Match specific words after matching complete sentences using regular expressions

Question

I am a novice. I'm trying to find the full name in any of the lines below and there is no Obituary for

<h2>Obituary for John Doe</h2>
<h1>James Michael Lee</h1>

My regular expression is like this.

(<h1>(.+?)<\/h1>|<h2>Obituary\sfor\s(.+?)<\/h2>)

What I got was still John Doe's obituary. How do I delete the obituary for ?

Answer 1

Can you do something like this without using regular expressions?

/**
 * @description : Function extracts names from html header tags
 * @example : "
Obituary for John Doe
James Michael Lee
" -> ["John Doe", "James Michael Lee"]
 * @param $html string
 * @return []string : list of full names
*/
function extractFullNames($html) {
    $regex = '/(.*?)<\/h[1-2]>/';
    preg_match_all($regex, $html, $matches);
    $names = $matches[1];
    $names = array_map('trim', $names);
    $names = array_map('strip_tags', $names);
    $names = array_map('strtolower', $names);
    $names = array_map('ucwords', $names);
    $names = array_map('removeObituary', $names); 
    return $names;
}

/**
 * @description : Function used to remove "Obituary For" if present
 * @example : "Obituary For John Doe" -> "John Doe"
 * @param $name string
 * @return string : name without "Obituary For"
*/
function removeObituary($name) {
    $name = str_replace("Obituary For ", "", $name);
    return $name;
} 

// Test cases
$html = '
Obituary for John Doe
James Michael Lee
';
$names = extractFullNames($html);
$expected = ['John Doe', 'James Michael Lee'];

echo "Expected: " . implode(', ', $expected) . "\n";
echo "Actual: " . implode(', ', $names);

Answer 2

All roads lead to Rome, you may do this:

|2>Obituary\sfor\s)\K[^><]+

Please view this demo at regex101. The match will be in $out[0].

\K Reset Start reporting the match. For more information, see SO Regular Expressions FAQ.