HTML span tag content and attribute preg_match regular expressions

Does anyone have a fix for the following;

I'm taking the following string:

<span id="tmpl_main_lblWord" class="randomWord">kid</span>

and using the following preg_match / regex rule;

preg_match("'/(<spa开发者_开发百科n id=.* class=.*>)(.*)(<\/span>)/'si", $buffer, $match);

But its returning with an empty array any ideas?

The following example uses DOMDocument:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHtml('<span id="tmpl_main_lblWord" class="randomWord">kid</span>');
$el = $doc->getElementById('tmpl_main_lblWord');
echo 'Inner text is: ' . $el->textContent;

In general I would strongly advise against using regex to try and get values from HTML. I would use an HTML parser. See this question: Robust and Mature HTML Parser for PHP

If you insist though... you seem to have two sets of nested quotes. I would remove the inner single quotes. That should solve your problem.