parsing html

[zaxon]

Hi,

I am looking to transfer content of hundreds of html files into a database. I need to search each html file for every occurrence of a link, image if there is one present, alt text and anchor text. It should then be placed in several variables $link, $src, $alt, $anchor and placed into a csv file so I can import it into a database. The only thing that I have done so far is read the contents of the html file into a string.

<a href="link.htm" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="example.jpg" alt="This is an example"><br>This is an example</a></td>

So in this example, I need to retrieve link.htm, example.jpg, 'This is an example', and 'This is an example'.

How would I go about doing that?

Thanks for the help

[MarkR]

You should use a proper HTML tagsoup parser, notably the DOM::loadHTML function which is available by default on PHP5. Be careful that it interprets all your documents in the correct encoding. This is awkward, as it will interpret anything as latin1 unless it contains a Content-Type META tag - so you may need to insert one as appropriate before parsing.

Any advice to say that you should use regular expressions to parse HTML is misguided, please ignore it.

Mark

[zaxon]

Thanks for the response.

I have PHP 4.4.0 installed on my server. I'll see if I can get 5 installed. If not, are there any other ways?