Finding Tags with Regular Expressions
preg_match_all('/<.*?>/', $string, $matches)
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One of the advantages of PCRE or POSIX is that some special constructs are supported. For instance, usually regular expressions are matched greedily. Take, for instance, this regular expression:
<.*>
When trying to match this in the following string:
<p>Sex, drugs and <b>PHP</b>.</p>
what do you get? You get the complete string. Of course, the pattern also matches on <p>, but regular expressions try to match as much as possible. Therefore, you usually have to do a clumsy workaround, such as <[^>]*>. However, it can be done more easily. You can use the ? modifier after the * quantifier to activate nongreedy matching.
Finding All Tags Using Non-greedy PCRE (non-greedy.php)
<?php
$string = '<p>Sex, drugs and <b>PHP</b>.</p>';
preg_match_all('/<.*?>/', $string, $matches);
foreach ($matches[0] as $match) {
echo htmlspecialchars("$match ");
}
?>
Which outputs:
<p> <b> </b> </p>
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