find text in source?

filn

i want to get how many post total in a vbulletin forum. every vbulletin has that little blurb at the bottom that says:

Threads:XXXXX, Posts: XXXXXX, Members: XXXXXX

i used curl to get the source of a remote forum index and save it to a file (works good), now do i use preg_match on the text file i saved the forums source in to find where it says "Post:"? is that the best way? or should i use strstr()? and then once i find the "Post:" how do I get the number after it?

thanks!

bradgrafelman

I would probably say REGEXP is the way to go... but can we see the actual HTML that displays this data? Just want to make sure there's no HTML jibberish we have to work around.

NogDog

You can use sub-patterns in a regex to get the individual values. Using the sample text from your post (and for now disregarding whatever HTML markup might be involved:

if(preg_match('/Threads: (\d+), Posts: (\d+), Members: (\d+)/', $string, $matches)
{
   $threads = $matches[1];
   $posts = $matches[2];
   $members = $matches[3];
}

filn

NogDog wrote:
You can use sub-patterns in a regex to get the individual values. Using the sample text from your post (and for now disregarding whatever HTML markup might be involved:
if(preg_match('/Threads: (\d+), Posts: (\d+), Members: (\d+)/', $string, $matches)
{
   $threads = $matches[1];
   $posts = $matches[2];
   $members = $matches[3];
}

thanks nogdog that looks like it will do exactly what i need.

filn

ok.. im back.. this is what ive got..

<?php

// site that has the forum
$site = curl_init("http://www.somesitewithaforum.com/forums/");

// file to hold the fourm index source
$temp = fopen("forum.txt", "w+");

// curl geting the page
curl_setopt($site, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_setopt($site, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_exec($site);
curl_close($site);

//close the source page
fclose($temp);

// read the source 
$source = "$temp";
$sourcefile = fopen($source, 'w+');
$thedata = fread($sourcefile, filesize($source));
fclose($source);

// find how many post are in the fourms by doing preg_match() 
// against the source file to get the line that has the post and threads info
if (preg_match('/Threads: (\d+), Posts: (\d+), Members: (\d+)/', "$thedata", "$matches") {
   $threads = "$matches[1]";
   $posts = "$matches[2]";
   $members = "$matches[3]";
}


// show me the money!
print_r($matches);

?>

what i get is..

Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in forum.php on line 24

help appreciated.. thanks!

Weedpacket

 "$matches"

Stop randomly putting variables inside strings. There is absolutely no reason to write

"$temp"

instead of

$temp

"$matches[1]"

instead of

$matches[1]

. Especially since sometimes a variable is needed (like

$matches

) and

"$matches"

is not a variable, but a string.