在特定字符串后使用preg_match查找模式的所有连续出现

Question

I have a huge html document that has different tables with unique table IDs. Something like:

<table class="my_table" id="table_id1">
  <tr class="odd"><td>Line 1</td></tr>
  <tr class="even"><td>Line 2</td></tr>
  <tr class="odd"><td>Line 3</td></tr>
  <tr class="even"><td>Line 4</td></tr>
</table>
<table class="my_table" id="table_id2">
  <tr class="odd"><td>Line 1</td></tr>
  <tr class="even"><td>Line 2</td></tr>
  <tr class="odd"><td>Line 3</td></tr>
</table>

Is it possible using preg_match to find HTML of all rows of a specific table?

I tried the following code:

preg_match('/<table[^>]*id="table_id2">(<tr[^>]*><td>[^>]*<\/td><\/tr>)+/', $html, $matches); 
//$html variable contains the html.

but it returns the output like:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => <table class="my_table" id="table_id2"><tr class="odd"><td>Line 1</td></tr><tr class="even"><td>Line 2</td></tr><tr class="odd"><td>Line 3</td></tr>
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => <tr class="odd"><td>Line 3</td></tr>
        )

)

But I need the output like this:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => <table class="my_table" id="table_id2"><tr class="odd"><td>Line 1</td></tr><tr class="even"><td>Line 2</td></tr><tr class="odd"><td>Line 3</td></tr>
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => <tr class="odd"><td>Line 1</td></tr>
            [1] => <tr class="odd"><td>Line 2</td></tr>
            [2] => <tr class="odd"><td>Line 3</td></tr>
        )

)

Is it possible? Please help.

Answer 1

You should not use regex for parsing HTML. PHP has a great tool for that - DOMDocument. Using it, you can do many things, that are impossible/near impossible with regex. Your sample will look like:

$sHtml = '<table class="my_table" id="table_id1">
  <tr class="odd"><td>Line 1</td></tr>
  <tr class="even"><td>Line 2</td></tr>
  <tr class="odd"><td>Line 3</td></tr>
  <tr class="even"><td>Line 4</td></tr>
</table>
<table class="my_table" id="table_id2">
  <tr class="odd"><td>Line 1</td></tr>
  <tr class="even"><td>Line 2</td></tr>
  <tr class="odd"><td>Line 3</td></tr>
</table>';

$rDoc   = new DOMDocument();
$rDoc->loadHTML($sHtml);
$sId    = 'table_id2';
//found table:
$rTable = $rDoc->getElementById($sId);
foreach($rTable->childNodes as $rItem)
{
   //do something with item:
   //var_dump($rItem);
}