Need help parsing text file w/PHP

[jumpyg]

I'm trying to parse a plain text file, then output it's contents into an HTML table. I'm having trouble with the parsing, though. I'm familiar with the regex functions, but I can't seem to combine everything I need together.

The text file contains one or more sections like this:
<event>Example event name</event>
<location>Example Location</location>
<date>Example date</date>
<description>Long description...</description>

Each event will contain the same attributes. If an event date has NOT already passed, the event should be output to the HTML table. So, I need to read in an event, compare the date with the system date (I can figure that part out), and then output the event as separate fields if appropriate.

Can someone give me some sample code read in one event at a time and output to HTML? Thanks!

[sidney]

 $chkdate=time();
$file=file_get_contents("test.log");
$replace=array("<location>","<date>","<description>");
$file=str_replace($replace,"",$file);
$sections=explode("</description>",$file);
echo "<table><tr><td>event</td><td>location</td><td>date</td><td>description</td></tr>\n";
for($i=0;$i<count($sections)-1;$i++)
	{
	list($junk,$rest)=explode("<event>",$sections[$i]);
	list($event,$rest)=explode("</event>",$rest);
	list($location,$rest)=explode("</location>",$rest);
	list($date,$description)=explode("</date>",$rest);
	$date1=strtotime($date);
	if($date1>=$chkdate)
		{
		echo"<tr><td>".$event."</td><td>".$location."</td><td>".$date."</td><td>".$description."</td></tr>";
		}
	}
echo"</table>";
 

test.log

 <event>event1</event> 
<location>Location1</location> 
<date>2005-04-02</date> 
<description>Long description1</description>
<more>test</more> 
<event>event2</event> 
<location>Location2</location> 
<date>2004-06-06</date> 
<description>Long description2</description>
<more>test</more> 
<event>event3</event> 
<location>Location3</location> 
<date>2004-04-02</date> 
<description>Long description3</description> 
<more>test</more>  

output

event location date description
event1 Location1 2005-04-02 Long description1
event2 Location2 2004-06-06 Long description2

[jumpyg]

Thanks for the quick answer Sidney! You've got some PHP functions in there I've never seen, so I will try this out and post my result later. I knew there had to be a better way to do this.

[sidney]

if you want to read up on any of the functions

just add the function to the end of this address www.php.net/

eg http://www.php.net/file_get_contents

[jumpyg]

Sidney--

Thanks again. That really helped a lot. I am familiar with php.net,
but I just had a hard time getting started.

One more question: Every field except for
the first one (event) ends up with a single
space before the text. I was thinking of
stripping this out with something like:
$location = preg_replace("/^{\s/","",$location);}

This doesn't work, though. I'm obviously not well-versed with regex.
Without the caret (^), it strips out every space. With the caret,
no spaces get taken out. I just want the leading space taken out.

Any ideas?

[sidney]

use the trim() function

eg

echo"<tr><td>".trim($event)."</td><td>".trim($location)."</td><td>".trim($date)."</td><td>".trim($description)."</td></tr>";

and just to help with your regex

$locations = preg_replace("/^{\s(.*?)$/","$1",$locations);}

^ indicates start of string
$ end of string
$1 the captured section between ()

[jumpyg]

Beautiful! Another new function I didn't know about. That saved a lot of code. Thanks!

[jumpyg]

One more question:
How would I go about putting each event entry in a data structure, sorting it by date, then outputting the data ordered by date? In c++, I would put each event in a class and insert the class in an STL List, etc. I don't know how to proceed in PHP, though. Thanks for any help.

[sidney]

if you mean put data into an array this all depends how you want
the array structured
a simple example

PHP] if($date1>=$chkdate)
{
$data_array[]=array($event,$location,$date,$description);
}
}//endwhile

foreach ($data_array as $key => $row) {
$c1[$key] = $row[2];
$c3[$key] = $row[0];
}
array_multisort($c1, SORT_DESC, $c3, SORT_ASC, $data_array);[ [/code]

[jumpyg]

I'll give that a shot. Thanks for getting me started Sidney.