Check tag & get the value inside tag using PHP

Question

I\'ve been confused. So here\'s my problem, I have a text like this :

Head of Pekalongan Regency, Dra. Hj.. Siti Qomariy         


        

Answer 1

preg_match will only return the first match, and your current code will fail if:

• The tag is not uppercased in the same way
• The tag's contents are on more than one line
• There are more than one of the tag on the same line.

Instead, try this:

function get_text_between_tags($string, $tagname) {
    $pattern = "/<$tagname\b[^>]*>(.*?)<\/$tagname>/is";
    preg_match_all($pattern, $string, $matches);
    if(!empty($matches[1]))
        return $matches[1];
    return array();
}

This is acceptable use of regexes for parsing, because it is a clearly-defined case. Note however that it will fail if, for whatever reason, there is a > inside an attribute value of the tag.

If you prefer to avoid the wrath of the pony, try this:

function get_text_between_tags($string, $tagname) {
    $dom = new DOMDocument();
    $dom->loadHTML($string);
    $tags = $dom->getElementsByTagName($tagname);
    $out = array();
    $length = $tags->length;
    for( $i=0; $i<$length; $i++) $out[] = $tags->item($i)->nodeValue;
    return $out;
}