Creating custom HTML tags to pass data to app

[azhar]

Hi there,

Templates for my web site are stored in a mysql database, they are in HTML and are fetched as a string which is printed by the web app.

What I would like to do is create custom HTML tags to pass instructions to the app, something like:

<customtag_fetch_random_from_table>products</customtag_fetch_random_from_table>

My question is how do I start a seach in the fetched template for <customtag_fetch_random_from_table> and end it at </customtag_fetch_random_from_table> therefore retreving the value ("products) as a variable?

Would it be a preg_replace? If so, what pattern expression would I use?

Thanks for all your help.

[qest]

I think that this should do the trick:

preg_match("/<customtag_fetch_random_from_table>(.*?)<\/customtag_fetch_random_from_table>/", $template, $match); // $match[1] should contain "products"

... But I didn't test it, and I'm not stellar with regexs.

Side note: A cleaner and more intuative (in my opinion) solution would probably be to use something like:

<query name="fetch_random_from_table" value="products" />