Is there a way to use regular expressions with Simple HTML DOM?

Simple HTML DOM is a PHP library that provides an easy way to manipulate HTML documents. It gives you the ability to select elements using CSS selectors, much like jQuery does with JavaScript. However, Simple HTML DOM does not natively support regular expressions for selecting elements.

But there is a workaround. If you're looking to use regular expressions to match text within elements, you can iterate through elements and then apply regular expressions to their text content. Here's an example of how you might do this:

include('simple_html_dom.php');

$html = file_get_html('http://example.com/');

// Find all elements you want to check with regex, for example, all paragraph tags
foreach($html->find('p') as $element) {
    // Now apply the regular expression to the text content of each paragraph
    if (preg_match('/your-regex-pattern/', $element->plaintext)) {
        // Do something with elements that match the pattern
        echo $element->outertext;
    }
}

In this example, your-regex-pattern is where you would put your regular expression.

If you're looking to filter elements based on attributes, you can similarly iterate through elements and then apply regular expressions to their attributes:

foreach($html->find('a') as $element) {
    if (preg_match('/your-regex-pattern/', $element->href)) {
        // Do something with elements that match the pattern
        echo $element->outertext;
    }
}

In this case, we're filtering a elements to find those with an href attribute matching the regular expression pattern.

While Simple HTML DOM doesn't support regex for selecting elements directly, PHP's powerful preg_match function and Simple HTML DOM's easy-to-use DOM traversal methods can be combined to achieve a similar effect.