How to... Pattern match in a HTML file

Anon

Hello and thank for even reading this topic. Basically here is what I want to do:
There is a HTML file that is opened in PHP as full html code and the content assigned let's say to $html_stream. What I want is to recover parts of this file's content that are placed between some repeating "pattern" that is <td colspan="2">Bla...Bla.. Bla </td> and get rid of the rest of html code (trash). So what I need is to recover that "Bla...Bla...Bla" string and save it somewhere (file, db, etc.). The string is not the same all the time but the enclosing stuff (<td colspan="2"></td>) is, and there are about 4 to 7 ocurences of per html page!
Any kind of help, code snippet or hint will be highly apreciated.

Vik

Anon

this example gets links from webpages..modify the regex and you shoudl be all set.

<?
$url = "http://localhost";
$file = file($url);
while ( list( , $line ) = each( $file ) ) {
while ( eregi( '(href[[:space:]]=[[:space:]]"?[[:alnum:]:@/._-]+"?)(.*)', $line, $links ) ) {
echo "$links[1]<br>\n";
$line = $links[2];
}
}
?>

fandelem

i hate to say this, but perl has a great module for parsing tables that you might want to look into. i had to parse 5,000 pages with over 100,000 entries and the html::tableextract module was excellent for the job ;o)

just another opinion, i still write 99% of everything in php, but i might as well use something that already works great than me struggling with it for hours on end hoping it will work ;o)