Regular expression to match a certain HTML element

Question

I'm trying to write a regular expression for matching the following HTML.

<span class="hidden_text">Some text here.</span>

I'm struggling to write out the condition to match it and have tried the following, but in some cases it selects everything after the span as well.

$condition = "/<span class=\"hidden_text\">(.*)<\/span>/";

If anyone could highlight what I'm doing wrong that would be great.

Answer 1

You need to use a non-greedy selection by adding ? after .* :

$condition = "/<span class=\"hidden_text\">(.*?)<\/span>/";

Note : If you need to match generic HTML, you should use a XML parser like DOM.

Answer 2

You shouldn’t try to use regular expressions on a non-regular language like HTML. Better use a proper HTML parser to parse the document.

See the following questions for further information on how to do that with PHP:

• How to parse HTML with PHP?
• Best methods to parse HTML