PHP

PHP

ZIP code regex PHP
ZIP code
XML regex PHP
XML
UUID regex PHP
UUID
URL regex PHP
URL
Street address regex PHP
Street address
SSN regex PHP
SSN
Regex match words PHP
Words match
Phone number regex PHP
Phone number
Password regex PHP
Password
Numbers only regex (digits only) PHP
Numbers only (digits only)
IP address regex PHP
IP address
Mac address regex PHP
Mac address
HTML regex PHP
HTML
GUID regex PHP
GUID
Email regex PHP
Email
Date regex PHP
Date
XML regex PHP

XML regex PHP

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language and is used for storing arbitrary data. Usually, it’s not a good thing to parse XML with regular expressions, but in certain situations, it can be very helpful to retrieve (scrape) a specific piece of information that you need.

JavaScript
JavaScript
Python
Python
Java
Java
C#
C#
PHP
PHP

Extract value between XML tags

One of the most common operations with XML and regex is the extraction of the text between certain tags (a.k.a. scraping). For this operation, the following regular expression can be used.

"/(?:<TAG.*?>)(.*?)(?:<\\/TAG>)/"

Test it!
/(?:<TAG.*?>)(.*?)(?:<\/TAG>)/g

True

False

Enter a text in the input above to see the result

Example code in PHP:

// Extract text between specific XML tag
$extract_xml_pattern = "/(?:<from.*?>)(.*?)(?:<\\/from>)/";
$string_to_match = '<note><to>Tove</to><from>Jani</from><heading>Reminder</heading><body>Don\'t forget me this weekend!</body></note>';
preg_match_all($extract_xml_pattern, $string_to_match, $matches);
print_r($matches[1]) // matches[1] is ['Jani']

Test it!

True

False

Enter a text in the input above to see the result

Test it!

True

False

Enter a text in the input above to see the result

Notes on regex XML extraction

While this extraction might be a good option in some cases, usually it’s better to use specific XML parsers for such tasks. In such case, once XML is validated and parsed, the required information can be retrieved using Document queries. For instance, in PHP the following code can be used:

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement("<note><to>Tove</to><from>Jani</from><heading>Reminder</heading><body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body></note>");
echo $xml->xpath("//from")[0]; // prints Jani