Regex - Greedyness - matching HTML tags, content and attributes

Question

I am trying to match specific span-tags from an HTML source.

The lang-attribute and the inner HTML of the tag are used as parameters for a function which returns a new s

Answer 1

Just adding ? , I think

/(<span lang="(.*?)">(.*?)</span>)/is

Answer 2

We'll never reapeat it again : do not use regular expressions to work with HTML !

Instead, use DOMDocument::loadHTML.

It'll allow you to manipulate your HTML data using the DOM, which is much more powerful and easier : you'll be able to :

• Use methods such as getElementById and getElementsByTagName for simple extractions,
• Use the DOMXPath class to make XPath queries on your document
• Work with DOMElements, and methods such as getAttribute / setAttribute
• ...

Really : take the time to learn DOM : it's a great investment !

Answer 3

You can specify it to be ungreedy using ?

/(<span lang="(.*?)">(.*?)<\/span>)/is

or make all expression ungreedy by default using PCRE_UNGREEDY modifier

/(<span lang="(.*)">(.*)<\/span>)/Uis