Need help with regular expression!

bloggy

Hi there!

I was trying to get the content of a given string with regular expression. This is the original content:

<BLOCKQUOTE class=efContents cite=http://www.mydomain.com/mydirectory1/>
<P>Anything here. This is text bla bla! How are you!? More Text here with commas, and more stuff.
</P></BLOCKQUOTE>

I tried with preg_match_all. But I don't get results. What I want is the text / content between the and . But there are many in the page, so I can not simply get the text with (.*?) ... anybody here can help me?!! Maybe it's a bit difficult because there are new lines (/n) in it?!

Thanks for your help!!! 🙂

bogu

Try something like this:

$str = "<BLOCKQUOTE class=efContents cite=http://www.mydomain.com/mydirectory1/>
<P>Anything here. This is text bla bla! How are you!? More Text here with commas, and more stuff.
</P></BLOCKQUOTE><P>asdasdasd
</P>asdas dasdasd<P>bogu</P>";
preg_match_all("|<[^>]+>(.*)(\s*)</[^>]+>|U",$str,$tmp);
echo "<pre>",print_r($tmp,1),"</pre>";

Dont know if its right I'm not a guru in regexp ... :p

Nope is not good, but I'm still trying with manual in front of me...

Installer

If you want something more flexible than a regular exprssion...

$str = str_replace(array('<P>', '</P>'), array('<p>', '</p>'), $str);
$arr = explode('<p>', $str);
foreach ($arr as $substr) {
    if (($pos = strpos($substr, '</p>')) !== false) {
        $text[] = substr($substr, 0, $pos);
    }
}

bloggy

Hi!

The first script doesn't work for me.

The second code is not specific enough. The original string which containts the <blockquote> .... etc. is much bigger than posted above. It contains hundreds of 's and </p'>s ... that's the reason why I need reg exp here...

Installer

If you take time to test the second code you'll see that it finds all text between and , whether there are hundreds of 's and </p'>s or only one and . That's why $text is an array.

But if you're dead set on a regular expression, never mind.

bloggy

Installer wrote:
If you take time to test the second code you'll see that it finds all text between and , whether there are hundreds of 's and </p'>s or only one and . That's why $text is an array.

But if you're dead set on a regular expression, never mind.

I know that. But I don't want any text within a and a . I ONLY want the text that's within the BLOCKQUOTE AND within the ... I hope you know what I mean?!

Installer

Then do the same for the blockquote, for crying out loud. That's what I meant by "flexible".

Edit: This is what I mean by "flexible":

function get_enclosed_text($str, $open, $close)
{
    $str = str_replace(array(strtoupper($open), strtoupper($close)), 
                       array(strtolower($open), strtolower($close)), $str); 
    $arr = explode($open, $str); 
    foreach ($arr as $substr) { 
        if (($pos = strpos($substr, $close)) !== false) { 
            $text[] = substr($substr, 0, $pos); 
        } 
    }
    return $text;
}

Example

$quote_strs = get_enclosed_text($str, '<blockquote>', '</blockquote>');
foreach ($quote_strs as $key => $val) {
    $sub_txt[$key][] = get_enclosed_text($val, '<p>', '</p');
}
print_r($sub_txt);