What are the best practices for extracting specific content from HTML tags using regular expressions in PHP?

When extracting specific content from HTML tags using regular expressions in PHP, it is important to use the correct regex pattern to match the desired content within the tags. It is recommended to use the preg_match() function in PHP to extract the content based on the regex pattern. Additionally, it is good practice to sanitize the extracted content to prevent any security vulnerabilities.

$html = '<div class="content">This is the content inside the div tag</div>';

// Extract content inside the div tag using regex
preg_match('/<div class="content">(.*?)<\/div>/', $html, $matches);

// Sanitize the extracted content
$extracted_content = htmlspecialchars($matches[1]);

echo $extracted_content;