Clueless newbie--help with search engine

pompousjerk

Hello,

I am trying to create a search engine for a mailing list archive. I need some help extracting words from the body of a given message, and putting them into a space-delimited string.

-The message body is between "<hr noshade>" tags
-I need to filter out entity refs and tags

Any help is appreciated.

--Josh Yotty

Anon

You should learn the basics of PHP first. The questions you are asking are very general and cover many different aspects of PHP.

This will point you in the right direction:

Determine what form your archive is in (You may know this, but you haven't specified) and figure out a way to pull it into your PHP code (via database connection or opening/reading a file)
Research and learn how to use regex, which is the term used to discribe some of the tools used to parse a file, document, varible, etc. Regex is not PHP specific, it used in other languages as well, specificaly PERL.
Learn how to use the implode(), explode(), trim() and some of the other varible/string modifying functions.
Write some code, try a variety of things, fail a few times, then come back and ask a more specific question. Everyone here will be glad to help.

pompousjerk

Right. I'll change how I ask questions from now on.

I've spent some time with the PHP manual, and the "PHP Developer's Cookbook" and this is what I have:

<?php
$f_contents = implode("", file('http://arandomlypickeddomain.com/dir/file.html'));
$first = strpos($f_contents, "<hr noshade>");
$first += 12;
$second = strpos($f_contents, "<hr noshade>", $first);
$length=$second-$first;
$body = substr($f_contents, $first, $length);
$body = strip_tags($body);
?>

I figure that I could use str_replace() for every instance of items I want to remove, but that seems like the hard way to go about it. What can you suggest as a better way?

(P.S.: What a difference a day makes in how much you know...)

Anon

Josh,

Sounds like you are on the right track. Honestly, I'm not sure if there is a better way. Sure, you could probably accomplish the same thing using a slightly different method, but I'm not sure if it will be any easier.

You might be able to tighten things up a bit, but generally, anytime you use regex to accomplish something, things will get a little messy.

If your going to use this code repeatadly, I would build a function and everytime you wanted to perform this type or parse you could call the fucntion. I wouldn't really change much, but it might make things easier and clean up your code a bit.

Has that helped at all? I think your headed in the right direction. If str_replace() works, I'd go with it. Maybe someone else can suggest otherwise.