Need a regex using PHP

Question

I have this segment of xml.

<condition name="gender" value="male">
    <condition name="somethingelse" value="somevalue">Target string</condition>
</condition>

You can see that these are nested.

What I need to do is get the middle condition containing the 'target string'.

People will probably suggest to use an xml parser or something, but I want to do it with regex.

I messed around with a regex but I just do not know them well enough yet.

Take this for example.

$regex = '<condition name="[a-z0-9]+" value="[a-z0-9]+">([^<>].*?)<\/condition>';
preg_match_all ( '/' . $regex . '/i', $haystack, $stuff );

What I was trying to do there was match the tags but ignore anything that contains < or > thus avoiding anything that does not contain text.

My example does not work, it's just to show where I got to and now I am stuck.

All it does is give this match, so I am part way there :

<condition name="gender" value="male"> <condition name="somethingelse" value="somevalue">Target string</condition>

Could anyone help please ?

If you know that you actually have XML, how did you come to the conclusion to use a regex for it? — mario
– mario, Commented Nov 9, 2014 at 20:39
"People will probably suggest to use an xml parser or something, but I want to do it with regex." Why? Is this a learning exercise? — shuttle87
– shuttle87, Commented Nov 9, 2014 at 20:42
It's XML yes, it describes an algorithm - if I use the xml parser I lose parts of the data that I need. — Rog
– Rog, Commented Nov 9, 2014 at 20:47

Chris Middleton · Accepted Answer · 2014-11-09 20:48:55Z

1

Here is a regex that will work (at least in the simple use case you've outlined above):

$regex = '/<condition name="[a-z0-9]+" value="[a-z0-9]+">([^<>]*)<\/condition>/';

Note that I removed the question mark (not sure what it was intended for) and put the asterisk after the [^<>] rather than having a period after. The string [^<>]* says to match zero or more characters not in the set {<, >}.

answered Nov 9, 2014 at 20:48

Chris Middleton

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