Reading an HTML file, matching between tags, into an array - WITH A TWIST!

zoomsan

Hello,

I have done a bit of searching but I can't get it exactly right.

I have an HTML file that I want to read.

In the file there are maybe 2000 cases of the following:

Code:

<FONT COLOR="#660066">X</FONT>

The color number changes however so instead of 660066 it may be sometimes FFFFFF, etc.

Anyways this line identifies above the "X" which I want to extract in each case (all 2000) and then I suppose I need to read them into an array then I can output them all without the font color info before and after them in one big long list.

I am a bit of a newbie but I am pulling a few things together. This is probably really easy to you experts there.

Thanks in advance!

bradgrafelman

Since I would use regular expression here, and it's rather hard to explain, I'll give you an example code snippet, though I normally try not to just hand out code...

$data = file_get_contents('the_file.html'); // replace with the location to your HTML file

$pattern = '@\<font color="#[0-9]{6}"\>(.*?)\</font\>@i';
preg_match_all($pattern, $data, $matches);

In that example, $matches[0] will contain an array of all of the matches instances including the FONT tags. $matches[1] will be a similar array, however the FONT tags will have been stripped away leaving just the 'X' in your example.

zoomsan

Thank you very much.

I did this and it echo's simply "Array". Is it possible there is something small wrong with the regular expression? I just did echo $matches[0];

One other note - "X" equals 1 Japanese Kanji character - not sure if that matters, but it might!

bradgrafelman

bradgrafelman wrote:
$matches[0] will contain an array

Learn how to handle arrays: [man]foreach[/man], [man]print_r[/man], ...

EDIT: Also, I thought the purpose of this was to match the 'X' and NOT display the FONT tags. As you'll note in my previous post, $matches[0] will contain the FONT tags, $matches[1] will not contain them - just the X.