PHP : Extracting String Between Two Tags By Childs Content

I have this following html markup:

• Online: 2/14/2010 3:40 AM

• Solution 1:

  I suggest use an HTML Parser here, DOMDocument in particular with xpath.

  Example:

  $markup = '<ul>
      <li>
          <strong>Online:</strong>
          2/14/2010 3:40 AM
      </li>
      <li>
          <strong>Hearing Impaired:</strong>
          No
      </li>
      <li>
          <strong>Downloads:</strong>
          3,840
      </li>
  </ul>';
  
  $dom = new DOMDocument();
  $dom->loadHTML($markup);
  $xpath = new DOMXpath($dom);
  // this just simply means get the string next on that strong tag with a text of Downloads:
  $download = trim($xpath->evaluate("string(//strong[text()='Downloads:']/following-sibling::text())"));
  echo $download; // 3,840
  

  
  

  Solution 2:

  Use a html parser for parsing html files. If you insist on regex then you could try the below,

  <li>[^<>]*<strong>Downloads:<\/strong>\s*\K.*?(?=\s*<\/li>)
  

  DEMO

  Code:

  $string = <<<EOT
  <ul>
      <li>
          <strong>Online:</strong>
          2/14/2010 3:40 AM
      </li>
      <li>
          <strong>Hearing Impaired:</strong>
          No
      </li>
      <li>
          <strong>Downloads:</strong>
          3,840
      </li>
  </ul>
  EOT;
  $regex = "~<li>[^<>]*<strong>Downloads:<\/strong>\s*\K.*?(?=\s*<\/li>)~s";
  if (preg_match($regex, $string, $m)) {
      $yourmatch = $m[0]; 
      echo $yourmatch;
      } // 3,840
  

  
  

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