How to extract varibles from HTML tables (using PHP)

The problem is that I read a HTML file in PHP, the main content of HTML file is a table with fields as column and rows as records. How can I extract the values to a variable, say, an associate array?
I figure out that I must trip out all the HTML tags except tag TR and TD, then use some Regular Expession but haven't found the final solution yet.

 

yes you can do a

$text = strip_tags($html, '<td>');

PHP:

and then regexp with something like this:

$pattern = '/<td>([^<]+)<\/td>/';
preg_match_all($pattern, $text, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

PHP:

You should end up with all your matches in $matches[0]

http://php.net/strip_tags
http://php.net/preg_match_all

HTH, cheers!

 

read a file in a string, then use explode function

note code is not precise

 

Thanks guys,
I found that the picouli's method is pretty useful. However, in my cases, it works with PREG_PATTERN_ORDER or none, and the usable array is matches[2].
In fact, since the <td> tags has parameters, so we need to include them in the regexp. Further, we need to include empty cells as well, so + is replaced by *.

$pattern = '/<td([^<]*)>([^<]*)<\/td>/';

PHP: