Regex select all text between tags

Question

What is the best way to select all the text between 2 tags - ex: the text between all the 'pre' tags on the page.

Answer 1

<pre>([\r\n\s]*(?!<\w+.*[\/]*>).*[\r\n\s]*|\s*[\r\n\s]*)<code\s+(?:class="(\w+|\w+\s*.+)")>(((?!<\/code>)[\s\S])*)<\/code>[\r\n\s]*((?!<\w+.*[\/]*>).*|\s*)[\r\n\s]*<\/pre>

Answer 2

You can use "<pre>(.*?)</pre>", (replacing pre with whatever text you want) and extract the first group (for more specific instructions specify a language) but this assumes the simplistic notion that you have very simple and valid HTML.

As other commenters have suggested, if you're doing something complex, use a HTML parser.

Answer 3

To exclude the delimiting tags:

"(?<=<pre>)(.*?)(?=</pre>)"

Answer 4

This seems to be the simplest regular expression of all that I found

(?:<TAG>)([\s\S]*)(?:<\/TAG>)

1. Exclude opening tag (?:<TAG>) from the matches
2. Include any whitespace or non-whitespace characters ([\s\S]*) in the matches
3. Exclude closing tag (?:<\/TAG>) from the matches

Answer 5

Try this....

(?<=\<any_tag\>)(\s*.*\s*)(?=\<\/any_tag\>)

Answer 6

I use this solution:

preg_match_all( '/<((?!<)(.|\n))*?\>/si',  $content, $new);
var_dump($new);