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phpxpathpreg-match

PHP: Get Values of all <options> Tag to an array

First of all: Sorry, I´m just learning coding, so this might be an easy question :).

What I want to archive is getting the values of all 

<option value="123"></option>
<option value="412"></option>

in an html document into an array. So for the above example only the "123" "412" etc. The arrays then will get checked if they are only numbers.

This is what i got:

$html = file_get_contents(url);
preg_match_all('/value="(\w+)"/', $html, $result);
var_dump($result);
$digits = array_filter($result, 'ctype_digit');

What I get from this is nothing, because the $result gives me results like:

value="123"

I do know that I messed up with those regular expressions, but I cant´t get ir right.

And then I´m not sure whether it is better to use XPath to select it, but I did not get that either :(.

Any help is highly appreciated! :)

Solution

  • My advice would be to not use a regex but a domparser.

    For your provided data, the $result is an array which contains 2 arrays. Your values are in the second array $result[1]

    You could update your code to:

    preg_match_all('/value="(\w+)/', $html, $result);
$digits = array_filter($result[1], 'ctype_digit');
var_dump($digits);

    That would give you:

    array(2) {
  [0]=>
  string(3) "123"
  [1]=>
  string(3) "412"
}

    Php demo output

    An alternative regex:

    value="\K\d+(?=") which would match one or more digits d+

    Php demo output