Regex question, PHP

[tomaszjot]

I have this HTML, need to grab price

<div class="somediv">                                                                                                                                    <p class="pricediv">  
               £33.11             </p> 
                                             </div>

Price is 33.11 (as you probably see).

I try to build regex to get it, no success. I'm totally rubbish with it so got few questions:

1. Should I treat empty spaces between lines in some special way? Like use /n or something to go to the next line?

2. What if the price div is wrapped with <noscript> tag, should it change my approach?

3. I built very simple regex to get price:

$regex = '/.*?<div class="somediv "><p class="pricediv">(.+?)<\/p<\/div>.*?/';

It doesn't work of course. I built successful regex for some other pages but stuck with this one.

Any help much appreciated.

 

[pickledegg]

Don't have the actual answer but check out http://gskinner.com/RegExr/ it's perfect for playing about with regex on the fly and learning by doing.

 

[Insomniac]

Given the available information, I'd be inclined to just be lazy:

$regex = '/£([0-9\.]*)\s/';

 

[mattinator]

I would go about solving the problem using existing tools, namely: PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

It looks like once you grab the page in question you may be able to just do something like this:

$ret = $html->find('div[id=foo]')


Unless you had a good reason not to do this (e.g. you're trying to write very lean code), using this DOM parser would be the way I'd go about it.

 

[rish3]

If you want to use the regex, you'll need the 's' operator for the . to match across a line:

'/regex/s'

 

[tomaszjot]

Thanks for help guys, will work on it. Thanks

 

[jdrmar]

PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser is a nice tool but tends to break down on big, javascript etc heavy pages. In those cases use xpath. It's got a bit of a learning curve but well worth it if you're going to do any serious scraping

PHP: DOMXPath - Manual

 

[nickCR]

I would leave out the DIV, just look for the P and the pound. The dom path is probably your best bet with the paragraph.

 

[harrymouni]

Umm, unless I'm mising something [\s] character class matches all whitespace so this works on your string, I tested at preg_match - regular expression PHP functions - functions-online

/<div class="somediv">[\s]+<p class="pricediv">[\s]+(.+?)[\s]+<\/p>[\s]+<\/div>/

Also, you're probably better off asking all programming questions on StackOverflow these days