Regex problem for using an OR statement

The following regex looks for the pattern including </a>.  I would like to add in an OR condition which also includes patterns which include </span>, which somestimes is shown in results in place of </a>, is that possible?

Regex:

$pattern = '~">[^ ]+<\/a>~i';

I thought I could do '~">[^ ]+(<\/a>|<\/span>)~i';

But doesn't work

What about:

$pattern = '/(<\/a>)|(<\/span>)/';

What about:

 

$pattern = '/(<\/a>)|(<\/span>)/';

Hi thanks for replying but it is slighly more complex because of the full search string:

$pattern = '~\<a href="http:\/\/www\.site\.net\/page\.php\?action=p\&uid=[0-9]+">[^ ]+<\/a>~i';

This will successfully extract the TEXT in the following HTML:

<a href="http://www.site.net/page.php?action=p&uid=29">TEXT</a>

But not instances where the format changes slightly:

<a href="http://www.site.net/page.php?action=p&uid=29"><span style="color:#ffcc00">TEXT</span></a>

An adjustment to the pattern regex is what I am looking for so to still extract the TEXT given either of these formats

(NOTE: THE COLOUR HEX IS VARIABLE!)