PHP: Regex to get name="" 's value

Question

I'm still very much learning Regex and I suck at it :(

I am getting an external webpage, saving it to a local file. The page contains a form, now I need to find all the form's input's names and put it into an array, for example:

<input type="text" name="firstName">

or

<input type="text" name="firstName" class="something">

from the above I just need firstName to go into my array.

To complicate matters just a little bit, I have noticed people writing it a bit different sometimes because of the space character, like so:

name= "firstName"
name = "firstName"
name ="firstName"

As I am still learning, I would really appreciate it if you could explain your regex

Do̴n͟'̡t p͞ar͜se ͟H̀T̶ML̶ ̸w͟ít͏h ͡r̡e͜g͘ex͟.͢. Use a HTML parser instead. For a relatively small amount of HTML it's ok, but not for what you want to achieve. — Andrei P.
– Andrei P., Commented Mar 25, 2015 at 12:33
or use the DOMdocument::getElementsByTagName method and iterate through, grabbing the name property. — SierraOscar
– SierraOscar, Commented Mar 25, 2015 at 12:36
Thanks Avinash, will have a look. Andrei, will look into HTML parsers, got a recommendation? S O, isn't that Javascript? — Ryan
– Ryan, Commented Mar 25, 2015 at 12:37
@Ryan PHP already has HTML parsers built-in with it. Take a look at DOMDocument of PHP — Kevin
– Kevin, Commented Mar 25, 2015 at 12:45

SierraOscar · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-25 13:07:16Z

1

Quick example:

<?PHP

$myDocument = new DOMDocument;
$myDocument->loadHTMLfile('example_page.html');

// Get form item(s)
$formItems = $myDocument->getElementsByTagName('form');

// Get input items from first form item
$inputItems = $formItems->items(0)->getElementsByTagName('input');

// Name attributes
foreach ($inputItems as $inputName) {
     echo $inputName->getAttribute('name') . "<br />";
}

?>

answered Mar 25, 2015 at 13:07

SierraOscar

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1 Comment

Ryan Over a year ago

Using your example I get" Fatal error: Call to undefined method DOMNodeList::items()", this is the line $inputItems = $formItems->items(0)->getElementsByTagName('input');

Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-25 13:03:28Z

1

You can use something like

$xmldoc = new DOMDocument();
$xmldoc->load('REQUIRED_URL');
foreach ($xmldoc->getElementsByTagName('form') as $formitem) {
    $inputnodes = $formitem->getElementsByTagName('input');
    $name = $inputnodes->item(0)->getAttribute('name');
    echo $name;
}

answered Mar 25, 2015 at 13:03

Wiktor Stribiżew

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1 Comment

Ryan Over a year ago

I keep getting this warning (and no output other than this warning) Warning: DOMDocument::load(): Opening and ending tag mismatch: link line 7 and head in ...

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