[Resolved] Parsing HTML tags -- Regexp geeks please help!?

nemonoman

Here's what I'm trying to parse:

<DIV  style='width:420'  id=0 class=jt>
<SPAN class=T1675751k0>
OCEANFRONT APT 
</SPAN>
<SPAN class=T1675751b>
Green Diamond Unit 2103. Beautifully upgraded 3/3. Jacuzzi bathroom, marble floors. Asking $4,500 unfurnished. Call Tony Cho 305-693-3422.
<BR>
</SPAN>
</DIV>

I've added newlines to make the string breaks more clear. The actual strings being parsed are more like:

OCEANFRONT APT </SPAN><SPAN class=T1675751b>Green Diamond Unit 2103. Beautifully upgraded 3/3. Jacuzzi bathroom, marble floors. Asking $4,500 unfurnished. Call Tony Cho 305-693-3422.<BR></SPAN></DIV><DIV style='width:420' class=j><SPAN class=T1675751b> </SPAN></SPAN></DIV>
There has got be a simple way to do this, but I'm at my wit's end.

What I'd like, ideally, is an array that looks something like:
c<DIV style='width:420' id=0 class=jt>';
$array[0]='<SPAN class=T1675751k0>';
$array[1]='OCEANFRONT APT ';
$array[2]='</SPAN>';
$array[3]='<SPAN class=T1675751b>';
$array[4]='Green Diamond Unit 2103. Beautifully upgraded 3/3. Jacuzzi bathroom, marble floors. Asking $4,500 unfurnished. Call Tony Cho 305-693-3422.';
$array[5]='<BR>';
$array[6]='</SPAN>';
$array[7]='</DIV>';

My current method of grinding through the string character by character is a disaster. There must be a better way.

I have gotten some traction using explode. But so far every method I try ends up getting too complex to maintain.

I'm really bad with regexps.
Also, please help me by noting whether I should be using ereg or preg_match_all or whatever. I can't figure out the difference between these functions either.

luxluxlux

What you're looking for is solved by this package:

http://pear.php.net/package/XML_HTMLSax

It's an HTML parser, meaning it parses HTML in an XML-like fashion, and compensates for most of the ugliness and inconsistencies of HTML, like missing closing tags, unquoted attributes, mixed cases, etc.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Lux

sneakyimp

what exactly does it do? i've downloaded it...would like to see a demo? sample? description? documentation? i couldn't find that stuff at that link.

nemonoman

Thanks for the tip. I have taken a look at the XML functions in the php manual, and they will indeed take care of what I'm trying to do.

I didn't know that you could use these functions with HTML -- that's an unexpected bonus indeed.

Sneaky, the XML functions will parse XML or HTML text, returning the attributes of a tag or the contents between tags, etc.