PregMatchAll always returns 0 even while regex matching

Question

I have been doing this:

preg_match_all('!<div class="ratings">\s*?(.*?)\s*<\/div>!', $result, $match);

for my this block

<div class="ratings">
<h4><a href="https://www.abcd.com/star-ratings">Sex 
<i class="icon-star-filled highlight"></i><i class="icon-star-filled 
highlight"></i><i class="icon-star-filled highlight"></i><i 
class="icon-star-filled"></i><i class="icon-star-filled"></i></a></h4>
<h4><a href="https://www.abcd.com/star-ratings">Sex 
<i class="icon-star-filled highlight"></i><i class="icon-star-filled 
highlight"></i><i class="icon-star-filled highlight"></i><i 
class="icon-star-filled"></i><i class="icon-star-filled"></i></a></h4>
</div>

But my match always returns zero while doing

print_r($match[1]);

What might be the problem?

Parsing HTML with regex = EVIL! Please use an XML/HTML parser. — Tim Biegeleisen, Feb 11 '19 at 06:16

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 11 '19 at 06:20

0

Add flag s to your pattern !<div class="ratings">\s*?(.*?)\s*<\/div>!s http://xregexp.com/flags/

answered Feb 11 '19 at 06:20

Sergey Poltaranin

494
2
7

Thanks that worked. How to read h4 tags inside div? Let's say I have 3 h4 tags inside div. – bhaskar Feb 11 '19 at 07:13
```!
(.*?)!s```
– Sergey Poltaranin Feb 11 '19 at 07:20
I have edited the div block. let say I have multiple h4 tags. If I am doing count it will give 0. :(. I want the count to be equal to the number of h4 tags. How to achieve that? – bhaskar Feb 11 '19 at 07:38
RegExp above works fine. ```count($matches[1])``` should be equal to h4 tags count. You can check it here https://www.functions-online.com/preg_match_all.html – Sergey Poltaranin Feb 11 '19 at 07:51
Its giving me 1 – bhaskar Feb 11 '19 at 07:57

PregMatchAll always returns 0 even while regex matching

1 Answers1

(.*?)!s```