mulitple istances of tags

Anon

I have a .txt file that I have to extract news stories from.

The stories are laid out in the .txt file like this...

<story>
<headline>Todays headline</headline>
<date>2001-10-18</date>
<summary>News item</summary>
</story>

This is repeated about 5 or 6 times, depending on the amount of news that day.

I need to detect each and every headline,summary etc, but when I try and fine the start and close tags of say, headline, i am finding the first and last tags, and where I want to see a one line output, I am getting nearly the whole text file. Make sence?

I need to pick out each headline, each date, not just one, and not the whole file ;-)

I have followed my books as far as I can, and looked loads on0line for a way round this, but I just cannot fathom it.

Can anybody please help me sort this problem out???

Tris...

Anon

A pointer, which might help you:

If you have expat installed, have a look at
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.xml.php
since the code you are working on is in fact XML.

-jens

tarqwin

Cheers jens...,
I thought that first of all too, but it is not true XML, and when I asked the guys who are giving me this text file, if it was supposed to be, they said no.

There are a number of tags I did not mention that do not have closing tags, and also there is no single parent tag, and the tags are not embedded within each other all the time, so the XML standards do not apply. I appreciate a quick responce, but does anyone have a PHP solution?
Tris...

Anon

Well, ok then.

In that case, a quick and dirty solution could be:

<?php
// get the stories
$stories = "<story>
<headline>Todays headline</headline>
<date>2001-10-18</date>
<summary>News item</summary>
</story>
<story>
<headline>2.Todays headline</headline>
<date>2222-10-18</date>
<summary>2. News item</summary>
</story>";

// create an array with each seperate story
$story_items = explode("</story>", $stories);
$a = 0;

// for each story
while($story_items[$a]) {
// create an array with each seperate line in the current story
$story_item_lines = explode("\n", $story_items[$a]);
$i = 0;
// for each story line
while($story_item_lines[$i]) {
// if we find the headline tag, strip the tags, and store the text
if (ereg("<headline>", $story_item_lines[$i])) {
$story_item_lines[$i] = trim(strip_tags($story_item_lines[$i]));
$headline = $story_item_lines[$i];
}
elseif (ereg("<summary>", $story_item_lines[$i])) {
$story_item_lines[$i] = trim(strip_tags($story_item_lines[$i]));
$summary = $story_item_lines[$i];
}
// continue with the rest of the tags
$i++;
}
echo "summary: $summary<br>";
echo "headline: $headline<br>";
$a++;
}
?>

let me know if it works 🙂

jens