Regular Expression to Extract Javascript Object from Scraped HTML

Question

I have a full page HTML scraped that have a lot of markup including HTML/CSS/JS code.

example below (stripped content)

<p>blah blah blah html</p>
<script type="text/javascript">window._userData ={"country_code": "PK", "language_code": "en",user:[{"user": {"username": "johndoe", "follows":12,"biography":"blah blah blah","feedback_score":99}}],"another_var":"another value"} </script>
<script> //multiple script tags can be here... </script>
<p>blah blah blah html</p>

Now I want to extract the object in window._userData and then if possible convert that extracted string into PHP object/array.

I have tried a few regular expressions found on SO but couldn't get it working.

I have also tried the similar answer here Regular expression extract a JavaScript variable in PHP

Thanks

@splash58 I have added the missing } , Thanks for comment, any solution please? — Alyas
– Alyas, Commented Jun 13, 2016 at 10:30
moreover, it cannot contain spaces and must have all keys in quotes - `{"country_code":"PK","language_code":"en","user":[{"user":{"username": "johndoe","follows":12,"biography":"blah blah blah","feedback_score":99}}],"another_var":"another value"}' — splash58
– splash58, Commented Jun 13, 2016 at 10:33
/<script[^>]*>\s*window\._userData\s*=\s*([\s\S]*?)<\/script>/ and parse with json — YOU
– YOU, Commented Jun 13, 2016 at 10:36

splash58 · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-13 10:39:15Z

2

find by regex

preg_match('/\bwindow\._userData\s*=(.+)(?=;|<\/script)/', $html, $m);

and decode

json_decode(trim($m[1]), true);

But before you should make correct json in that html.

answered Jun 13, 2016 at 10:39

splash58

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4 Comments

Johannes Stadler Over a year ago

This is the right anwer, but still you will have problems when the script tag contains more than one JS object and/or the object contains strings with ;. If you can rule that out it will work. edit: JS is not a regular language therefor this answer applies

splash58 Over a year ago

@JohannesStadler if json contains ; or EOL, its reallly a problem, i don't know how to solve

Johannes Stadler Over a year ago

I think it's not possible with regex. Js is not a regular language so regex has its limits.

splash58 Over a year ago

@JohannesStadler Yuo are right. Unfortunately, i don't know any library to parse js but js itself :).

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