How to make a dot in a regex pattern match newline characters?

Question

I am having difficulty doing regular expressions when there is whitespace and carriage returns in between the text.

For example in this case below, how can I get the regular expression to get "<div id="contentleft">"?

<div id="content"> 


<div id="contentleft">  <SCRIPT language=JavaScript>

I tried

id="content">(.*?)<SCRIPT

but it doesn't work.

Answer 1

$s = '<div id="content">

<div id="contentleft">  <SCRIPT language=JavaScript>';

if( preg_match('/id="content">(.*?)<SCRIPT/s', $s, $matches) )
    print $matches[1]."\n";

Dot, by default, matches everything but newlines. /s makes it match everything.

But really, use a DOM parser. You can walk the tree or you can use an XPath query. Think of it like regexes for XML.

$s = '<div id="content">

<div id="contentleft">  <SCRIPT language=JavaScript>';

// Load the HTML
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($s);

// Use XPath to find the <div id="content"> tag's descendants.
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$entries = $xpath->query("//div[@id='content']/descendant::*");

foreach( $nodes as $node ) {
    // Stop when we see <script ...>
    if( $node->nodeName == "script" )
        break;

    // do what you want with the content
}

XPath is extremely powerful. Here's some examples.

PS I'm sure (I hope) the above code can be tightened up some.