Finding within a file

[robertaccettura]

Can anyone provide me with an example on how to do the following:

I have a nice sized text file that my system downloads periodically from another computer on my network. (the program that genrates it is old, and I can't really touch it... it's not broken, so not fixing it. The file is really a bunch of garbage for the most part, with an exception. It contains a line with a name and data in a similar form:

name=hi dat123="<something>"

I want to be able to find out what the <something is>... realizing it can change in length, and this entire line can occur anywhere in the file.

So how does one do a search for the line, then extract something in php for a situation like this?

What's the proper way to do this?

[acidbox]

You can use the strpos function to jump to an exact spot in a file defined by a certain string that you can set.

For instance, you could cut off everything up to and including the <a name> tag using this:

<?php
$code = substr($file strpos($file, "<a name=hi dat123=\"<something>\">") );
?>

You can really do whatever you want with it once you find the location you are looking for.

[robertaccettura]

Used this:

$sourcenews = "/ppath/to/file";

$code = substr(strpos($sourcenews, "what to find"), 1);
print $code;

and got nothing for $code.

[acidbox]

u cant just pull from a file by naming a variable and putting a file path to it.

You have to use the fopen function