too long

Question

I've trying to preg_match_all a date with slashes in it sitting between 2 html tags; however its returning null.

here is the html:

> <td width='40%' align='right'class='SmallDimmedText'>Last Login: 11/14/2009</td>

Here is my preg_match_all() code

preg_match_all('/<td width=\'40%\' align=\'right\' class=\'SmallDimmedText\'>Last([a-zA-Z0-9\s\.\-\',]*)<\/td>/', $h, $table_content, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

where $h is the html above.

what am i doing wrong?
thanks in advance

Answer 1

It (from a quick glance) is because you are trying to match:

Last Login: 11/14/2009

With this regex:

Last([a-zA-Z0-9\s\.\-\',]*)

The regex doesn't contain the required characters of : and / which are included in the text string. Changing the required part of the regex to:

Last([a-zA-Z0-9\s\.\-\',:/]*)

Gives a match

Would it be better to simply use a DOM parser, and then preform the regex on the result of the DOM lookup? It makes for nicer regex...

EDIT

The other issue is that your HTML is:

...40%' align='right'class='SmallDimmedText'>...

Where there is no space between align='right' and class='SmallDimmedText'

However your regex for that section is:

...40%\' align=\'right\' class=\'SmallDimmedText\'>...

Where it is indicated there is a space.

Use a DOM Parser It will save you more headaches caused by subtle bugs than you can count.

Just to give you an idea on how simple it is to parse using Simple HTML DOM.

$html = str_get_html(...);
$elems = $html->find('.SmallDimmedText');
if ( count($elems->children()) != 1 ){
    throw new Exception('Too many/few elements found');
}
$text = $elems->children(0)->plaintext;

//parsing here is only an example, but you have removed all
//the html so that any regex used is really simple.
$date = substr($text, strlen('Last Login: '));
$unixTime = strtotime($date);