How to Match Newline Characters in Regular Expressions When Capturing Text Between `` Tags?

Matching Newline Characters in Regular Expressions

In this question, the user aims to capture text between

and

tags. However, the initial regular expression /

(.*)

match failed to match newline characters. To resolve this, the DOTALL` modifier (/s) is needed:

'/<div>(.*)<\/div>/s'

By using this modifier, the dot (.) in the regular expression can match newline characters.

Alternatively, a non-greedy match (.*?) can be used:

'/<div>(.*?)<\/div>/s'

This will ensure that the match stops at the first occurrence of

.

If there are no other tags within the

tags, the following regular expression can be used to match everything except < within the tags:

'/<div>([^<]*)&<\/div>/'

However, it's important to note that nested divs, extra whitespace, HTML comments, and other complexities can make parsing HTML with regular expressions challenging. For reliable parsing, it's advisable to use an HTML parser instead.

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