Regular Expressions

BulldogGC

Hey guys/gals,

What I'm trying to do is take a page and strip EVERYTHING from

<html>

</div>

And display the stuff AFTER the end of the div tag.

So basically remove everything from <html> to </div>

I have the fopen, all that stuff already done ... I just specifically need the removal help 😕

thanks!

eoghain

You want to use a regex that looks something like this:

/<html>[.]*<\/div>/

Depending on how your regex reads this it will either remove up to the first </div> tag or all the way up to the last </div> tag.

BulldogGC

$newline = eregi_replace("<html>[.]*<\/title>","",$line);

I had no dice with that ... am I missing something?

synergypoint

I would use Perl regular expresions...they handle greediness and laziness much better than the ereg functions.

Use something like preg_replace and use '' (nothing) as the replacement string.

I would use something like this...

$search='/<HTML>[\s\S]*?</DIV>/i';
$replace='';
$fcontents=preg_replace($search,$replace,$fcontents);

By the way I belive that will grab all </DIV> tags so if you only want the first one you will need to use a greedy expression like...

$search='/<HTML>[^{(</DIV>)]*?</DIV>/i';}

I haven't tested that so syntax could be off but basically you would want to exclude the function from grabbing multiple copies of </div> inside your search string.

By the way you can make life much easier on yourself if you have control over the page you are stripping content from by placing HTML comment tags in your code where you want to strip HTML.

BulldogGC

<?
	if($file = fopen("http://site.com/file.html","r")) {
		while(!feof($file)) {
			$content = fgets($file,1024);
			$search = '/<html>[\s\S]*?</html>/'; 
			$replace = ''; 
			$fcontents = preg_replace($search,$replace,$content);
				print($fcontents); 
		}
	}
	else {
		print("There was an error in printing the data.");
	}	
?>

No dice ...

Note: Just pretend I want to remove everything, final code would not strip everything from <html> ALL the way to the end ...

HalfaBee

Your search string needs to look like this

$search = '/<html>.*?<\/div>/';

What were the Ss's for ?

Halfabee

BulldogGC

Still no dice, closer though ..

$search = '/<html>.*.<\/html>/';
$replace = ''; 
$fcontents = preg_replace($search,$replace,$content);
  print($fcontents);

The above code is a modified version of the one you gave Bee (it didn't work 🙁 ) ... but that code WILL remove stuff ... for instance I tried it on <title> to the end of </title> and it worked fine ... But beyond that it won't work (eg. <html>-</html>

BulldogGC

Anyone?

BulldogGC

Helloooooooooooooooooooooo
So close to finishing this, can someone help?

xblue

we're all trying to help 😉

okay: when a literal slash is contained within the pattern, it is a good idea not to use it as delimiter (or escape it).

then, why doesn't it say </div> in your pattern anymore?

$search = '/<html>.*.</html>/';

there is an extra dot that doesn't seem to make much sense, and you may need to use ungreedy matching to catch the first ending div tag instead of the last.

also, are you aware of the modifiers? i means case-insensive, and it is likely you need the s modifier which makes the dot means anything including line breaks.

$search = '#<html>.*?</div>#si';

majiclab

There seems to be a small bug ahem in the message board, having to do with adding/stripping slashes. For example, the text below should have a backslash before it (should be: "\ntesting", this bug seems to only happen in PHP tags).

\ntesting

I would try using this Perl regular expression:

preg_replace('/<html>.*<\\/div>/si', '', $content);

As well, the other thing I noticed is that you are trying to read the file using a 1024 byte buffer and loop through to the end of the line. That's nice and all, but very C++-ish, but the problem lies in the fact that you are running the regular expression replacement on each individual 1024-byte portion of the file. It's quite possible that the reason it is not working is simply because there is no </div> in the first 1024 bytes of the file, and then when the next 1024 bytes are read, there is not starting <html> for the expression to match.

Try just using the file() function. It will return the entire file into an array. Then you could do this:

$file = file('/path/to/file');
$contents = join("\r\n", $file);
$contents = preg_replace('/<html>.*<\\/div>/si', '', $contents);

That should work. If it doesn't, then I'm lost. As well, if you want to remove everything up to the first </div>, then you need to add a capital 'U' to the /si above. So that it would look like:

$contents = preg_replace('/<html>.*<\\/div>/Usi', '', $contents);

That is because Perl regular expressions are greedy by default, but greediness would cause everything up to the last </div> to be removed. So depending on how you want it to work, add/remove the U to the expression.

For more info on the file() function, or on regular expressions:

http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.file.php
http://ca.php.net/manual/en/pcre.pattern.modifiers.php

Hope that helps.

-Percy