[php] PHP/regex: How to get the string value of HTML tag?

I need help on regex or preg_match because I am not that experienced yet with regards to those so here is my problem.

I need to get the value "get me" but I think my function has an error. The number of html tags are dynamic. It can contain many nested html tag like a bold tag. Also, the "get me" value is dynamic.

<?php
function getTextBetweenTags($string, $tagname) {
    $pattern = "/<$tagname>(.*?)<\/$tagname>/";
    preg_match($pattern, $string, $matches);
    return $matches[1];
}

$str = '<textformat leading="2"><p align="left"><font size="10">get me</font></p></textformat>';
$txt = getTextBetweenTags($str, "font");
echo $txt;
?>

$userinput = "http://www.example.vn/";
//$url = urlencode($userinput);
$input = @file_get_contents($userinput) or die("Could not access file: $userinput");
$regexp = "<tagname\s[^>]*>(.*)<\/tagname>";
//==Example:
//$regexp = "<div\s[^>]*>(.*)<\/div>";

if(preg_match_all("/$regexp/siU", $input, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER)) {
    foreach($matches as $match) {
        // $match[2] = link address 
        // $match[3] = link text
    }
}

Since attribute values may contain a plain > character, try this regular expression:

$pattern = '/<'.preg_quote($tagname, '/').'(?:[^"'>]*|"[^"]*"|\'[^\']*\')*>(.*?)<\/'.preg_quote($tagname, '/').'>/s';

But regular expressions are not suitable for parsing non-regular languages like HTML. You should better use a parser like SimpleXML or DOMDocument.

The following php snippets would return the text between html tags/elements.

regex : "/tagname(.*)endtag/" will return text between tags.

i.e.

$regex="/[start_tag_name](.*)[/end_tag_name]/";
$content="[start_tag_name]SOME TEXT[/end_tag_name]";
preg_replace($regex,$content); 

It will return "SOME TEXT".

Try this

$str = '<option value="123">abc</option>
        <option value="123">aabbcc</option>';

preg_match_all("#<option.*?>([^<]+)</option>#", $str, $foo);

print_r($foo[1]);

try $pattern = "<($tagname)\b.*?>(.*?)</\1>" and return $matches[2]

In your pattern, you simply want to match all text between the two tags. Thus, you could use for example a [\w\W] to match all characters.

function getTextBetweenTags($string, $tagname) {
    $pattern = "/<$tagname>([\w\W]*?)<\/$tagname>/";
    preg_match($pattern, $string, $matches);
    return $matches[1];
}

this might be old but my answer might help someone

You can simply use

$str = '<textformat leading="2"><p align="left"><font size="10">get me</font></p></textformat>';
echo strip_tags($str);

https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php

Your HTML

$html='<ul id="main">
    <li>
        <h1><a href="[link]">My Title</a></h1>
        <span class="date">Date</span>
        <div class="section">
            [content]
        </div>
    </li>
</ul>';

//function call you can change the tag name

echo contentBetweenTags($html,"span");

// this function will help you to fetch the data from a specific tag

function contentBetweenTags($content, $tagname){
    $pattern = "#<\s*?$tagname\b[^>]*>(.*?)</$tagname\b[^>]*>#s";
    preg_match($pattern, $content, $matches);
    
    if(empty($matches))
        return;
    
    $str = "<$tagname>".html_entity_decode($matches[1])."</$tagname>";
    return $str;
}