How to make dot match newline characters using regular expressions

by

You need to use the DOTALL modifier (/s).

'/<div>(.*)<\/div>/s'

This might not give you exactly what you want because you are greedy matching. You might instead try a non-greedy match:

'/<div>(.*?)<\/div>/s'

You could also solve this by matching everything except ‘<‘ if there aren’t other tags:

'/<div>([^<]*)<\/div>/'

Another observation is that you don’t need to use / as your regular expression delimiters. Using another character means that you don’t have to escape the / in </div>, improving readability. This applies to all the above regular expressions. Here’s it would look if you use ‘#’ instead of “https://stackoverflow.com/”:

'#<div>([^<]*)</div>#'

However all these solutions can fail due to nested divs, extra whitespace, HTML comments and various other things. HTML is too complicated to parse with Regex, so you should consider using an HTML parser instead.

More Related Contents:

  1. regular expression [closed]
  2. How to get “v.3.1.2” in string by regex php [duplicate]
  3. Regex to validate range of numbers from 50 to 1000 with step of 50 [closed]
  4. Replace preg_replace() e modifier with preg_replace_callback
  5. Is there a PHP function that can escape regex patterns before they are applied?
  6. Remove new lines from string and replace with one empty space
  7. How to mimic Stack Overflow Auto-Link Behavior
  8. Optional Whitespace Regex
  9. How to replace text URLs and exclude URLs in HTML tags?
  10. How to split a string by multiple delimiters in PHP?
  11. Convert string into slug with single-hyphen delimiters only
  12. Get domain name (not subdomain) in php
  13. Using PHP Replace SPACES in URLS with %20
  14. Get numbers from string with PHP
  15. PHP Regex find text between custom added HTML Tags
  16. Function eregi() is deprecated [duplicate]
  17. regex matching links without tag
  18. Split string into sentences using regex
  19. How to search in an array with preg_match?
  20. Regex & PHP – isolate src attribute from img tag
  21. php regex word boundary matching in utf-8
  22. Replace tabs and spaces with a single space as well as carriage returns and newlines with a single newline
  23. How to validate a domain name using Regex & PHP?
  24. How to properly escape a backslash to match a literal backslash in single-quoted and double-quoted PHP regex patterns
  25. PHP regex for validating a URL
  26. Regex matching table rows in HTML [duplicate]
  27. PHP – detect whitespace between strings
  28. What is the MM/DD/YYYY regular expression and how do I use it in php?
  29. Finding @mentions in string
  30. PHP: Escape RegEx pattern to prevent being applied?

Leave a Comment