preg_match_all returns an empty array

[loriann]

hi,

I have a problem with preg_match function returning empty arrays for my wonderful regexes. However, I can't see what I am doing wrong - maybe one of you could help?

I'm loading the source of a website into variable and then using preg_match_all to extract all occurrences of a string.

it looks like this (where source code is loaded into $page variable):[code=php]
preg_match ('/<div\s+?id="srN um_\d+?"\s+?cla ss="number">(.* ?)<\/div>/', $page, $results);[/code]

a sample string which should be matched by the above is:[code=hml]
<div id="srNum_0" class="number"> 1.</div>[/code]

Funny that preg_match_all also doesn't work if I give a direct regex to match the line above:[code=php]
preg_match_all ('/<div id="srNum_0" class="number"> 1\.<\/div>/', $page, $results);[/code]

On the other hand this one works fine:[code=php]
preg_match_all ('/<title>(.*?)< \/title>/',$page, $results);[/code]

Tried hard to find the answer, to add backslashes, change single quotes to double quotes etc.
Can you see a mistake? Should any characters be escaped?

cheers

[Atli]

Hi.

I tried your regular expression and it worked fine on my test server.

This is the code I used:
[code=php]
<?php
$str = ' <div id="srNum_0" class="number"> Contents of the div</div>';
$regex = '/<div\s+?id="srN um_\d+?"\s+?cla ss="number">(.* ?)<\/div>/';

if(preg_match_a ll($regex, $str, $patterns))
{
echo "Success!\n ". print_r($patter ns, true);
}
else
{
echo "Failed!";
}
?>
[/code]
Which gave me:

Success!
Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => 
Contents of the div

        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => Contents of the div
        )

)

Could it be that your are simply reading the return array incorrectly?

I'm running PHP 5.2.4 by the way.

[loriann]

Hi,

thank you for your reply.
It turns out that the problem was not actually the regexps itself. As you said this should be working I started to look for a problem elsewhere. It looks that the page content wasn't loaded properly into the variable - now it's sorted out and regexes are returning what they are supposed to.

Thank you for help.

cheers