preg_match_all returns an empty array

[loriann]

hi,

I have a problem with preg_match function returning empty arrays for my wonderful regexes. However, I can't see what I am doing wrong - maybe one of you could help?

I'm loading the source of a website into variable and then using preg_match_all to extract all occurrences of a string.

it looks like this (where source code is loaded into $page variable):

preg_match ('/<div\s+?id="srNum_\d+?"\s+?class="number">(.*?)<\/div>/', $page, $results);

a sample string which should be matched by the above is:

<div id="srNum_0" class="number">1.</div>

Funny that preg_match_all also doesn't work if I give a direct regex to match the line above:

preg_match_all ('/<div id="srNum_0" class="number">1\.<\/div>/', $page, $results);

On the other hand this one works fine:

preg_match_all ('/<title>(.*?)<\/title>/',$page, $results);

Tried hard to find the answer, to add backslashes, change single quotes to double quotes etc.
Can you see a mistake? Should any characters be escaped?

cheers

[Atli]

Hi.

I tried your regular expression and it worked fine on my test server.

This is the code I used:

<?php
$str = ' <div id="srNum_0" class="number">Contents of the div</div>';
$regex = '/<div\s+?id="srNum_\d+?"\s+?class="number">(.*?)<\/div>/';
 
if(preg_match_all($regex, $str, $patterns))
{
    echo "Success!\n". print_r($patterns, true);
}
else
{
    echo "Failed!";
}
?>
 

Which gave me:

Success!
Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => 
Contents of the div
 
        )
 
    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => Contents of the div
        )
 
)
 

Could it be that your are simply reading the return array incorrectly?

I'm running PHP 5.2.4 by the way.

[loriann]

Hi,

thank you for your reply.
It turns out that the problem was not actually the regexps itself. As you said this should be working I started to look for a problem elsewhere. It looks that the page content wasn't loaded properly into the variable - now it's sorted out and regexes are returning what they are supposed to.

Thank you for help.

cheers