grabing text between tags

Anon

Hi,
I'm sure this won't be a tough problem for most of you but I'm relatively new to PHP. Here's a sample file I'm working on:

<name>John Doe</name>
<job>Janitor</job>
<address>76 nowhere place
New York, New York 87632</address>

I'm trying to place the data between each set of tags into a variable to eventually put into a db. I know how to open the file and loop through it, I just can't figure out the logic of how to grab the desired data. Also, how do you deal with the fact that the closing tag isn't always on the same line as the opening one? Thanks in advance,
Dylan

Anon

Take a look at strip_tags in the manual. That should get you started:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php

Jon Bertsch

Anon

I'm still pretty lost. I figured out how to strip all the tags but I still need to put the data between them in an array or into variables or just anywhere I can later acces them. Here's how I stripped the tags:
$temp = ereg_replace('<([^>]|\n)*>', '', $data[$i]);

Anon

First of all, to solve your last question, don't use file ( $filename ) to read the file into an array. We want it in an entire string like so:
$data = fread ( fopen ( $filename, "r" ), filesize ( $filename ) )
Now we should have the entire file as a string in $data.
Now I'm simply going to split the string into an array using the tag sequences as the delimeter:
$data = split ( "</\w+>[^<>]*<\w+>", $data )
Now this isn't perfect. As you'll notice, $data now looks like this:
$data[0]=<name>John Doe
$data[1]=Janitor
$data[2]=76 nowhere place
New York, New York 87632</address>
The first tag in the file and last tag in the file are still there, so we'll just do a quick strip_tags() for the first and last elements in $data:

$data[0] = strip_tags ( $data[0] );
$data[count($data)-1] = strip_tags ( $data[count($data)-1] )

Really hope that helps!

Anon

I just tried what you said and the entire file with no tages was in $data[0]. Obviously I can't use this because I need individual access to each data part like if they were in they're own index of $data. I'm getting close though, thanks. Also, could you explain the regex in the split command you used:
$data = split ( "</\w+>[^<>]*<\w+>", $data );
I'm just learning how to formulate these arcane expressions. Thanks again,
Dylan