Extracting HTML tags from file

Radon3k

Using fopen() and fgets() I retrieved a web site. Fine and dandy nothing hard, right? Ok so now I want to be able to go through that file line by line and search for an HTML tag, such as <title> and </title>. Ok so there's only two title tags, one opening and one closing. That's just an example. How do I go about doing something along these lines? Thanks. 🙂

laserlight

You could use regular expressions, e.g. preg_match()

I think that searching this messageboard might also reveal more answers.

cgraz

use file() to read the contents of the file into an array. Each new line is a new key in the array. You can go line by line by looping through the array. Just an idea.

CGraz

Radon3k

Hi,

Thanks for that. The only problem is that the site content is dynamic and changes on a regular basis. That regular basis is probably once ever hour or sooner. Would this make a difference? Thanks. 🙂

HalfaBee

You can use $page = file_get_contents() to grab the url.
You can also use preg_replace() to get the title.

This will grab the title info.
Not much use for anything else, but it will do that.

HalfaBee

$page = file_get_contents( "http://forum.powweb.com" );
 if( preg_match( "/.*<title>([^<]+)*/",$page,$title ) )
     echo str_replace( '<title>','',$title[0] );

Radon3k

Thanks for that however I have no idea what any of that means. I'm guessing that is a regular expression, in which case I'll need to read up on those as I know nothing about them.

HalfaBee

I hate regular expressions, but I am getting better at them.

It just looks like a lot of random characters sometimes 🙁

HalfaBee

Radon3k

That's why I'm "scared" of them. They intimidate me. 😃 I have a few PHP books, I'll be looking at those I do suppose. Thanks for your help. 🙂

Xoid

dunno what you want to achieve but you could look at a function called strip_tags();

Radon3k

Hi,

Thanks for that. What I'm trying to do is this: Take a web page, and extract certain tags, such as the <a></a> tags and the links that are in between them. Once I have the information I need, then I'll turn those into an RSS XML file which will then be parsed and displayed as HTML on my site showing the latest news headlines from sites such as Fox News (with their permission, of course).

There are some news aggregators out there that do this for you, but they either display a banner of some sort to their site, or when you click the link it goes to their site then to the news headlines. I decided that I would like to do this on my own. I found a tutorial on how to do this in Perl, located here. However, I don't know anything about Perl and I would much rather have it in PHP anyway.