XML & RegEx....

[bpat1434]

Hey all. I'm still trying to learn RegEx, and in doing so, I've gotten pretty familiar with it, but just can't get what I want working.

Basically, I want to extract all that is within the normal opening and closing tags. So I have an XML document set up like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" />

<tag1>
  <title>Some Title Text</title>
  <group1>
    <title>Some Title Text</title>
    <name uri="someurl" other="optional">A name</name>
    <name uri="someuri">A Name 2</name>
  </group1>
</tag1>

Now, I don't want any titles, or version or crap like that. So I wrote out this simple code (PHP 4, so I can't use the PHP 5 xml calls):

<?php

$contents = file_get_contents('test.xml');

preg_match_all("/<name uri=\"[a-zA-Z0-9.]*\" ([a-zA-Z0-9.]*)?>([a-zA-Z0-9.])*<\/buddy>//i", $contents, $matches);

echo '<pre>';
var_dump($matches);
echo '</pre>';
?>

Now, that won't ouput anything except an empty array. BUT if I change the expression to:

"/>([a-zA-Z0-9.]*)</i"

it gives me an array of 99 items. not what I want because all the titles and such are included.

How can I define that I want only the elements that say <name ????>SomeName</name> to be seen? I know I can use the optional character (?) to say it could be there. Still struggling along.

~Brett

[drew010]

i came up with the following:

preg_match_all("/<name[^>]*>(.*?)<\/name>/is", $xml, $matches);

and from using your sample xml file this is the print_r output...

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => <name uri="someurl" other="optional">A name</name>
            [1] => <name uri="someuri">A Name 2</name>
        )

[1] => Array
    (
        [0] => A name
        [1] => A Name 2
    )

)

hopefully thats what you were aiming for, if not let me know ill fix it up more.

[bpat1434]

Yeah, after I posted, I kept fideling, and got what I wanted.

Thanks for the help anyway though.

You wouldn't happen to know how to make xml be displayed on screen, rather than just in the source?

~Brett

[drew010]

with xslt you can tell a browser how to display xml source code by defining xhtml for various tags. an example is http://z.about.com/6/g/compnetworking/b/rss2.xml

the xsl code itself which defines the style is at
http://z.about.com/6/o/r2.xsl

[Weedpacket]

Or do you just mean you want to be able to display

<tag1>
  <title>Some Title Text</title>
  <group1>
    <title>Some Title Text</title>
    <name uri="someurl" other="optional">A name</name>
    <name uri="someuri">A Name 2</name>
  </group1>
</tag1>

Just like that? the (misnamed) htmlspecialchars() will be sufficient there.

But with this much messing around you'd probably be better of using XML functions.