how to parse this

jansky

i have an html code ('test.htm');

the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog
<table>

<tr><td>HELL WORLD </td></tr>

</table>

</body>
</html>

now i have my another scritp called

parse.php

templateFile="test.htm";
$output=file_get_contents($templateFile);
echo $output;

Question:
How can i only parse and display only this

<tr><td>HELL WORLD </td></tr>

bradgrafelman

Like this?

<?PHP
$pattern = "/(<!-- start grab here -->.*<!-- ENd grab here -->)/i";

preg_match($pattern, $html_data, $matches);

echo $matches[1];
?>

That is a case-INSENSITIVE match, and also includes the <!> tags in the output.

NOTE: The above code does NOT work. I am a serious newbie at regular syntax. Can someone please tell me how to match ANY character, INCLUDING line breaks?

The above code will only work if the <!> tags and the data is all on the same line. Appparently, ".*" won't match line breaks.

jansky

is there anyway that it can also linebreak??

dgrinberg

All you need to do is add the 's' modifier!

eg:

<?PHP
$pattern = "/(<!-- start grab here -->(.*?)<!-- ENd grab here --> )/is";

preg_match($pattern, $html_data, $matches);

echo $matches[1];
?>

This will make the '.' match on new lines as well.

See here for more details and different modifiers.

http://au2.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php

I think that you should also add brackets (so that it only returns the content between your comments as a sub match) and the question mark which will match on as few characters as possible. Allowing for multiple grabs per page!

jansky

im new to this one

what do you mean by adding a bracket??could you give me example?

and also i tried running the example and i got this error
Notice: Undefined offset: 1 in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\templatetrial\five.php on line 16

bradgrafelman

Undefined offset most likely means that no results were found...

What variable were you using for the subject ($html_data in my example) ? Are you sure that variable is populated with the correct HTML page you're trying to grab?

EDIT: I see the problem now. In the above code, there is an EXTRA SPACE. It seems to be an error with the board. Note the extra space BEFORE the bold-faced character:

$pattern = "/((.*?) )/is";

Remove that space, so that the > and ) are next to each other with no spaces in between and it should work fine.

Also, do you want to include the <!> tags in your output? If not, use $matches[2] instead of $matches[1].

If you want to use error checking, to make sure that it found a result, you could count the number of items in $matches since it will always be greater than 1 when a result is returned. Something like this:

if(count($matches) > 1) echo $matches[1]; else echo "Nothing to grab.";