How can regular expressions (PCRE) be utilized in PHP to extract and manipulate data from HTML content, such as retrieving printer status information?

To extract and manipulate data from HTML content in PHP using regular expressions (PCRE), you can use functions like preg_match() or preg_match_all() to search for patterns in the HTML code and extract the desired information. For example, to retrieve printer status information from an HTML page, you can define a regular expression pattern that matches the specific data you are looking for (e.g., printer status) and use preg_match() to extract it.

$html = file_get_contents('http://example.com/printer-status.html');

$pattern = '/Printer Status: (.*)/'; // Define the regular expression pattern to match the printer status information
if (preg_match($pattern, $html, $matches)) {
    $printerStatus = $matches[1]; // Extract the printer status information from the HTML content
    echo "Printer Status: " . $printerStatus;
} else {
    echo "Printer status information not found.";
}