Regex in html code - html

Question

<tbody id="clavier:infractionList2:tb">
<tr class="rich-table-row rich-table-firstrow ">
..............
..............
............
</tr>
</tbody>
I'm looking to find a Regex to get this value from a big text.
I tried this one but without result:
#<tbody id=\"clavier:infractionList2:tb\">(.*)</tbody>#

Answer 1

Regex with html is often a bad idea, because of potential recursive tags. Have you tried using an XML/HTML parser? For example, XmlDocument, XmlElement and XmlAttribute.
EDIT: The problem with regex and html in your example:
Cannot keep count of recursive tbody tags
Will the tbody tag can look like <tbody>...</tbody> or <tbody .../>?
Even if you know there will be one start and end tag, how do you know there won't be any plain text containing "tbody" somewhere inside the table, thus breaking the regex?

Answer 2

You may want to tell your regex engine that it should match newlines with the . as well.
In PHP, that would make the regex:
#<tbody id=\"clavier:infractionList2:tb\">(.*)</tbody>#s
Note the trailing s
Warning if there are 2 tbodies, this regex will match everything starting from the first tbody (with this ID) until the last tbody (ID-independent).
Example:
<tbody id="clavier:infractionList2:tb">Some data</tbody>
<tbody id="tbody2"></tbody>
will also be matched.

Answer 3

This works:
/<tbody id="clavier:infractionList2:tb">(.*?)<\/tbody>/is
Or full PHP:
<?php
$html = '<tbody id="clavier:infractionList2:tb">
<tr class="rich-table-row rich-table-firstrow ">
..............
..............
............
</tr>
</tbody> ';
preg_match_all('/<tbody id="clavier:infractionList2:tb">(.*?)<\/tbody>/is', $html, $matches);
var_dump($matches[1]);
That gives you the <tr...>....</tr> as a result. If you only want the dots you'll need to use something like:
/<tbody id="clavier:infractionList2:tb">.*?<tr.*?>(.*?)<\/tr>.*?<\/tbody>/is