preg_match_all grab everything in a HTML tag when malformatted - regex

Question

I am trying to automatically grab everything in a special tag in a html string.
What i need to do is grab everything in
<font size="8"></font>
so that i wrote following preg_match_all
preg_match_all('/<font(.*?)size="8"(.*?)>(.*?)<\/font\>/s', $row['html'], $titles,PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
however it only works on certain cases only for example following string (Mal-formatted) is failed to match. do you have any idea on how to fix this or to modify above preg with this
<font FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE="8">
<p><font color="#003300">adadas <br>
dfsf sdfsdf <font size="4"><br>
<br>
gdfgdg
</font>
</font>

Answer 1

Give something like this a try:
<?php
$titles = array(); // CREATE AN ARRAY
$string = '<font FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE="8"><p><font color="#003300">adadas <br>dfsf sdfsdf <font size="4"><br><br>gdfgdg</font></font>';
$dom_document = new DOMDocument(); // CREATE A NEW DOCUMENT
$dom_document->loadHTML($string); // LOAD THE STRING INTO THE DOCUMENT
// LOOP THROUGH EACH font TAG
foreach ($dom_document->getElementsByTagName('font') as $font_item) {
// CHECK TO SEE IF IT HAS A SIZE ATTRIBUTE OF 8
if ($font_item->getAttribute('size') == 8) {
$titles[] = $font_item->ownerDocument->saveXML($font_item);
}
}
print_r($titles);
Basically, instead of using REGEX, you can use PHP's built-in DOM Parser. What this script does is creates a new document named $dom_document and loads your string into it. Then it loops through any font tags that it finds and checks to see if any of them have an attribute of size="8". If it finds any, it grabs the HTML and stores it into the $titles array.