Is there a better way to write this regex?

I'm trying to pull the weather from the weather network. This code gives it to me, but it looks pretty long, and returns two values in the array (that's why I need to return $output[1] and not $output[0]), when I only want it to return one. Any ideas?

$url=file_get_contents("http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weather/cans0057?ref=homecity");

preg_match('开发者_运维知识库/<div id="obs_conds" class="hslice">.*?<img.*?alt="(.*?)".*?<\/div>/s',$url,$output);

print_r($output[1]);

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I think it's great. Maybe you can make shortcut from it

preg_match('/class="hslice">.*?<img.*?alt="(.*?)"/s',$url,$output);

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I believe preg_matches returns the whole match in the the first element of the array $output[1] and $output[1] the text that matched the first captured parenthesized subpattern, and so on (http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php). Regarding the regex optimization, I guess you're trying to pull everything inside <div id="obs_conds" class="hslice">, if that is the case I would try to do a dom search instead.

On the other hand maybe the best solution is to contact the site and set a webservice client. It seems to me that they do have the infrastucture for that.