Parse key=value from HTML-type string

[bladx]

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out how to take something like this:

<TAG name="something" title="first">

And extract the information using Regular Expressions so it is put into a multidimensional array like this:

TAG
|--- name -> something
|--- title -> first

Is it possible to do this with one of the PHP preg_* functions?

Andy

[twaynw]

You might want to consider flipping this backwards, i.e. create the array in php first and then have a php loop build out the html tags.

[bladx]

Thanks for the reply... but the reason I'm needing to parse it like this is because I'm making a simple Template class.

I parse the template html file for any special tags and I have that working okay. I'm still just trying to find a way to break up the information within the special tags into array of arrays.

[bladx]

Well, unless someone comes up with a better idea (which I wouldn't think would be that hard... 😉) here is what I came up with in the meantime...

$tagtable = array();
$i = 0;

if (isset($taginfo[2])) {
    $valuepair = explode(" ", $taginfo[2]);
    $tagtable[$i]['TAGTYPE'] = trim($taginfo[1]);

foreach($valuepair as $pair) {
    list($key, $value) = explode("=", $pair);
    $tagtable[$i][$key] = $value;
}

$i++;
}

So the output looks like this:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [TAGTYPE] => MTPL_VAR
            [NAME] => USERNAME
            [TITLE] => SOMETHING
        )

[1] => Array
    (
        [TAGTYPE] => MTPL_VAR
        [NAME] => USERINFO
    )

)

The key/values are the things like [NAME] => USERNAME, and [TITLE] => SOMETHING, etc.

[bpat1434]

You could always do:

preg_match_all('/<TAG ([^=]*="[^"]*")*>/', $html, $matches);

Then $matches would be filled with attribute="attribute value" then it's just a matter of making the array....

Or you could do:

preg_match_all('/<TAG (([^=]*)="([^"]*)")*>/', $html, $matches);