[RESOLVED] Parsing Embedded Objects

optikool

Hi I'm trying to find a function or a way to parse embedded Objects submitted in a form. I would like to parse embed objects simular to the following code..

where I could grab the type, src, width and height. Does anybody know of a function that I could use to do this?

Thanks in advance!

ManWithNoName

You could use JavaScript to get the values and send it to PHP via a hidden input.

Except for forms I never seen another way to send information from HTML to PHP, but I could be mistaken...

(Oh, with exception to XhttpRequests, of course)

optikool

The form would have a text field where a person would past in the embed code provided by sites like YouTube or Stage6. I would prefer to do all the parsing on the back end using php.

ManWithNoName

"The form would have a text field where a person would past in the embed code "

Then just get your values from that form.

Let say the form is:

<form name='x' action='process.php'>
  <input type='text' name='src' />
</form>

Then use $_POST['src'] to get the value in PHP.

You could then either add more inputs so that the users manually enters other information (I doubt you like this), or you could take the URI and on the server side do further checking of the link, like getting height and width of the file, by connecting to the file and checking its properties (I think this should be possible, but I have never done this).

optikool

The form would be something similar to this...

What I would receive from $src = $_post['src'] would be..

I need to parse this. I currently have them enter the height and width manually but the embed code already has this information along with the movie type so If I could get the information from the embed code there is less chance of user error.

Thanks for your inputs.

ManWithNoName

Now, I see. Well, you could this in one of two ways, either use DOM to get the nodeValue you need,

OoOr, use regex.

In your case I think you need to use regex, because you are sending the data back as a string, but I'm not sure about this.

For PHP RegEx functions you will find all you need to know here: http://se.php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php

And I think what you are looking for is this function: http://se.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php

Now, I suck at PHP -- yeah, I know, I should have told you that in the beginning, but whatever -- so I can't help you with RegEx... Not that much anyway...

I'm not sure but these patterns could maybe match what you are looking for:

Backslash () escapes stuff, ex. \/ will be interpreted as /.
The i after / means that the search is case insensitive.
The characters that go from a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z are a set of glyphs that represent the English language.

$pattern_width = '/^{width="[0-9]"$/i';}
$pattern_height = '/^{height="[0-9]}"$/i';
// note: I do not know if you need to escape the equal thingy (=), I do not think so.
$pattern_src = '/^{(http:\/\/|http:\/\/www.)[a-z0-9]*"/i';}
// I do not know what RegEx represents special characters such as underscore or dots so this expression would not match those. You could try to replace [a-z0-9] with . (a dot) it means it would match any character, however I think this would create a security issue if the user is allowed to enter any character into your form.

Anyhow, like I said, I do not know much about RegEx, check out the URI's I gave, and see if you will get any wiser.

I recommend that you mark this thread as resolved and ask a new question about how to RegEx your querry (or doing this with DOM) after you have searched the forum, because there have been many questions about this (RegEx, at least)... I think...

Good luck to you.

optikool

The DOMDocument Object looks like it will do what I want. Thanks for pointing me in the write direction.