reading a HTML file from a certain point

[Anon]

can anyone help me out...I want to have a php script read in a html page from a URL , but only certain text...lets say all the html code between <start> and <end>. Can anyone help me out?

[toma42]

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php

Just create a regex that looks for <start>.*<end>

[Anon]

i'm not really familiar with regualr expresions...so i'm having a bit of trouble.

i can read the html file into memory, no problem...using the $localhtml = readfile($url); function.....can you help me out with the regex part of it? I looked over the manual, but that doesn't seem to help me much. Or maybe a site that explains regex or preg_match better?

[Anon]

here is what i was trying (and i'm sure my logic is wrong...i'm new to this)

<?
$url= "http://www.someurl.com/Homepage.asp";

$contents = readfile($url);

if (preg_match("<start>.*<end>",$contents, $matches))
{
echo $matches;
}
else
{
echo "error test";
}

fclose($fp)
or die ("cannot close file");

?>

[Anon]

i should also say that what if i'm not using <start> and <end>...what if i just want all the text between 2 words....like "page news" and "contact"...would that work the same way as if between <start> and <end> ?

[toma42]

er, yes it would. If you try doing a search on ANY search engine, you will find many resources for regular expressions :p

[amcgrath]

For what its worth, I did the same thing awhile ago, and since the page I was grabbing was always the same (except for the data I needed) and the coder was kind enough to put a <! --- code starts here --- >
comment right where i wanted to start as well as an ending comment, I just read the file in and began my thing when i hit the comment:

$data = file(http://....);

while(list(,$line) = @each($data)) {

if ($line == "<! --- code starts here --- >") {

// begin doing my thing

} elseif ($line == "<! --- code ends here --- >") {

// stop doing my thing

}
}