Extract section of text and display help

[PTCrackpot]

Ok,

Thanks to all that are reading this, I am banging my head into the desk on this one. I have a text file with a ton of data, and its about 1500 lines long. I added two tags of sort to somehow only grab the text between these two points and show it on a php page. In theroy it sounds nice.. lol, but thats where I screwed up.

Here is an example of what I am trying to write.

<?php
$fd = fopen("/export/web/public_html/report.txt", "r");
$startString="APPLICATIONSTARTREPORT"; 
$endString="APPLICATIONENDREPORT";
preg_match_all("/$startString(.*?)$endString/", $fd, $Applications, PREG_SET_ORDER); 
echo ($Applications);
?>

APPLICATIONSTARTREPORT
=============================================================================================
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| APPLICATIONS INSTALLED |
|-----------------------------+-----------+---------------------------------------------------|
| Application |INSTALLED |VERSION |
|-----------------------------+-----------+---------------------------------------------------|
| Disk Free Script (BCADDY) | X | Version: 1.0 8/26/2005
| Veritas Volume Manager | |
| Veritas Cluster | |
| Sun Cluster 3.X | |
| CST | |
| EDS Patch Tool | |
| ESM | X |6.0 (2003/09/10 01:07)
| EUM | TEST |
| SUDO | |
| OpenSSH | |
| PERL For Solaris | |
| SendMail (SMTP) | X |Version 8.11.7p1+Sun
| Java Runtime (JDK) SUNWj2rt | X | VERSION: 1.2.2,REV=2001.09.10.12.37
| Java Runtime (JDK) SUNWj3rt | X | VERSION: 1.4.0,REV=2002.03.19.23.51
| Java Runtime (JDK)SUNWj3rt.2| |
| WebSphere Application Server| |
| Apache | TEST |
| Oracle Data Base Server | TEST |
|-----------------------------+-----------+---------------------------------------------------|
| To add applications to this list, Contact Bryan Caddy, |
|-----------------------------+-----------+---------------------------------------------------|
APPLICATIONENDREPORT

All I want to do is show this text table on a web page.. no formating or nothing.
Please help, I just cant figure out what I did wrong.

[PTCrackpot]

I tried this, and all I get back is "Array"

<?php
$fd = fopen("/export/web/public_html/report.txt", "r");
$startString="APPLICATIONSTARTREPORT";
$endString="APPLICATIONENDREPORT";
preg_match("/($startString)(.*?)($endString)/", $fd, $Applications);
echo ($Applications);
?>

[toplay]

Well, preg_match() returns an array ($Applications). When trying to display an array like that, you must specify the index you want, otherwise PHP simply displays that it's an array() (what you're getting). To dump the contents of an array quickly to see how many indexes it has and what it contains use:

echo '<pre>', print_r($Applications, TRUE), '</pre>'; // A quick dump of an array

You have not read from the file. You've just opened it.

You need the 'S' option so the dot will also match newlines.

Try:

$data = file_get_contents('/export/web/public_html/report.txt'); // PHP >= 4.3.0
if (preg_match('/APPLICATIONSTARTREPORT(.*?)APPLICATIONENDREPORT/s', $data, $Applications)){
    $Applications = $Applications[1];
} else {
    $Applications = "";
}

echo $Applications;

EDIT:

If you want to display APPLICATIONSTARTREPORT and APPLICATIONENDREPORT tags as part of your output, then use $Applications[0] instead of $Applications[1].

🙂

[PTCrackpot]

You rock, that did the trick. Thanks for the help!