Regular Expression Question

thegiffman

Hey Everyone,

I'm trying to parse through an HTML file using preg_match to find the author of a given artile in my archive. The title field for the article has the title and author, separated by the word "by"

<title>Confused by Terror by Mark Tooley</title>

Normally this would give me the phrase containg the author, because I know the phrase will start with "by" and end in "</title>":

"/ by [ .\w]*<\/title>/i"

That would give me "by Mark Tooley</title>" and I could just use strip_tags to get rid of the HTML tag and delete the first 3 characters to get rid of "by".

However, in this case, my Regex will give me:

"by Terror by Mark Tooley</title>"

because the word "by" is in the title. I can't limit the author's name to 2 words, because I've seen some authors with names of 4 words and over. How can I set up a regular expression that will insist that the phrase start with "by", end with "</title>", AND not have the word "by" in the middle?

Giff

LordShryku

Dunno if I would use regex for this. Could, but dunno if it's needed. I might try using [man]strrpos[/man] with [man]substr[/man] to extract it. Since you use strrpos, it will find the last occurance. Just use by(replace underscores with spaces) as the search term. The spaces should ensure that "by" isn't part of the author's name.

swr

I would use a regular expression, only because I hate messing with string indexes.

Try this:

preg_match("/. by (.?)</", $your_string, $matches);
echo $matches[1];

LordShryku

Actually, the combination wouldn't be needed. [man]strrchr[/man] would do it all. Either way.

Weedpacket

Only 'cos I know this problem well enough not to need to think about it:

#\bby\b\s+(((?!\bby\b).)*?)</title>#

The name will be element 1 in the array of matches.

thegiffman

LordShryku -

That seems like it would work - except the documentation says that strchr will only work searching for a single character. I haven't had a chance to actually try it yet...