Help with calling variables in a text file...

[brianb]

Hello once again!

I have a text file DB that stores items like so:

<!--2 --><b><u>Some Stuff:</u> </b> <a href='/cgi-bin/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid1029949756,26210,' class='main'>This is the headline!</a> <span class="small">(8.21.2002) by Brian</span><br>

So, in this file I have hundreds of these "chunks" of HTML.

Now, I don't even know where to start, but maybe someone here has an idea.

I need to call this HTML, depending on the <!--number goes here --> variable via PHP.

The "number goes here" variable is a variable for a category...

So, what I'd like to do via PHP is call everything residng in <!--number goes here --> ...etc etc etc.

For instance. I wanna list each chunk of HTML with this at the beginning:
<!--2 -->
Same with:
<!--69 -->
Same with:
<!--274 -->

etc etc etc.

I'm only gonna be calling one <!--number goes here --> variable per page, so the code doesn't have to be dynamic...it can be hard coded for each category.

How would this be done via PHP? Any examples are appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[vocoder]

you could do something like this, if you have an ending tag

$strstart = "<!--$number-->";
$strdend = "<!-- $number ending tag -->";
eregi("($strstart)(.*)($strend)",$htmlstring,$selected_out);

$selected_out should now contain your selected code

[Weedpacket]

Painful when you don't have a real database, isn't it?

If you're going to use these bits pretty often, it would be heavy going to keep reading and rereading the file. So read the file once and store its contents in core.

$file = join('', file($filename));
preg_match_all("/<!--(\d+)\s*-->((?:(?!<!--\d+\s*-->).)*)/s", $file, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);
unset($file);
$db=array();
foreach($matches as $match)
{ $db[$match[1]]=$match[2];
}

//What does this achieve?
// print_r($db); to find out.