$re = '/<\/i>\s*(.*)\n.*<span class="text-muted"/ms';
$str = '<div class="col-md-4 col-sm-6 col-lg-3">
<small class="text-muted pull-right">4.4</small>
<i class="custom-icon"></i>
desired content to retrieve
<span class="text-muted">some other text here</span>
</div>';
preg_match_all($re, $str, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER, 0);
// Print the entire match result
var_dump($matches);
Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for PHP, please visit: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php