regex to scrape data from html table

Question

On one site there is data in form of table. I get its source code like this

<tbody>
    <tr>
        <td></td>
        <td><a href="http://www.altassets.net/ventureforum/" target="_blank">AltAssets Venture Forum</a></td>
        <td>27 March 2014</td>
        <td>London, UK</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td></td>
        <td>AltAssets Limited Partner Summit</td>
        <td>3-4 June 2014</td>
        <td>London, UK</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td></td>
        <td>AltAssets Limited Partner Summit</td>
        <td>3-4 June 2014</td>
        <td>London, UK</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td></td>
        <td>LP-GP Forum: Infrastructure &amp; Real Estate</td>
        <td>7 October 2014</td>
        <td>London, UK</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td></td>
        <td>Envirotech &amp; Clean Energy Investor Summit</td>
        <td>4-5 November 2014</td>
        <td>London, UK</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td></td>
        <td>AltAssets Fundraising &amp; IR Forum</td>
        <td>9 December 2014</td>
        <td>Hong Kong</td>
    </tr>
</tbody>

IS it possible to write regex which gives event, date, city separately?

What do you mean by gives event, date, city separately? They are already in seperate <td> tags . . . how do you want them to be separated more? — talemyn
– talemyn, Commented Feb 20, 2014 at 18:19
@talemyn: I want to extract each of them and store in different var named event, data, city. I could not figure it out — user1788542
– user1788542, Commented Feb 20, 2014 at 18:28

Paul Way · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-20 18:12:07Z

1

You should be able to use: <td>.+?</td>

answered Feb 20, 2014 at 18:12

Paul Way

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4 Comments

user1788542 Over a year ago

thanks Paul. Means it's possible. can you please explore to get each td value seperately for each tr

Paul Way Over a year ago

Well, to TimWolla's point above... parsing HTML with RegEx isn't the best tool. If you are, I'd use two loops. The outer loop would be for the rows <tr>.+?</tr> and the inner loop would use the td.

user1788542 Over a year ago

I could not understand the structure of regex here. Can you please give clue by giving loop here

tenub Over a year ago

preg_match_all("/(?<=<td>).+?(?=</td>)/", $source_string, $matches) will grab just the values. Since your HTML is very well structured you could map the results array to a new array whose elements each contain an array of three elements (keys being event, date, city).

ntaso · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-20 18:54:56Z

1

$matches = array();
preg_match_all("/<tr>(.*)<\/tr>/sU", $s, $matches);
$trs = $matches[1];
$td_matches = array();
foreach ($trs as $tr) {
    $tdmatch = array();
    preg_match_all("/<td>(.*)<\/td>/sU", $tr, $tdmatch);
    $td_matches[] = $tdmatch[1];
}
print_r($td_matches);

Put your string in $s. $td_matches contains a nested array with all TD-contents separated by each TR.

answered Feb 20, 2014 at 18:54

ntaso

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