How do I extract HTML content using Regex in PHP

Posted by gAMBOOKa on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by gAMBOOKa
Published on 2010-05-12T12:06:50Z Indexed on 2010/05/12 12:14 UTC
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I know, i know... regex is not the best way to extract HTML text. But I need to extract article text from a lot of pages, I can store regexes in the database for each website. I'm not sure how XML parsers would work with multiple websites. You'd need a separate function for each website.

In any case, I don't know much about regexes, so bear with me.

I've got an HTML page in a format similar to this

<html>
<head>...</head>
<body>
    <div class=nav>...</div><p id="someshit" />
    <div class=body>....</div>
    <div class=footer>...</div>
</body>

I need to extract the contents of the body class container.

I tried this.

$pattern = "/<div class=\"body\">\(.*?\)<\/div>/sui"
$text = $htmlPageAsIs;
if (preg_match($pattern, $text, $matches))
    echo "MATCHED!";
else
    echo "Sorry gambooka, but your text is in another castle.";

What am I doing wrong? My text ends up in another castle.

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