[RESOLVED] Extract sections from a file

[ClarkF1]

Hi,

I have a text file content.txt with format:

---SECTIONSTART---
Section Title
Section Paragraph 1

Section Paragraph 2
---SECTIONEND---
---SECTIONSTART---
Section Title
Section Paragraph 1

Section Paragraph 2
---SECTIONEND---
---SECTIONSTART---
Section Title
Section Paragraph 1

Section Paragraph 2
---SECTIONEND---

What I want to do is read each section into it's own array (called section0, section1 etc...) with one line per array element and then replace the blank lines with a <p> tag

I have no idea where to start. I know it might be something to do with pregmatch but I'm confused by all the symbols used etc.

Any ideas

[bradgrafelman]

Using something like this:

$data = file_get_contents('content.txt');
$pattern = '/---SECTIONSTART---\s{1,2}(.*?)\s{1,2}---SECTIONEND---/si';
preg_match_all($pattern, $data, $myArray);

will probably do most of what you want. You'll be interested in what's returned in $myArray[1], as the output will look something like this:

Array
        (
            [0] => Section Title
Section Paragraph 1

Section Paragraph 2
            [1] => Section Title
Section Paragraph 1

Section Paragraph 2
            [2] => Section Title
Section Paragraph 1

Section Paragraph 2
        )

Looping through the array, using [man]explode/man to split each item on line breaks will give you the three separate entities.

[ClarkF1]

Many thanks