help with parsing/regular expressions

[bobbyfletcher]

Hello, new at php and I'm stuck with a small script I'm trying to build.

I want to parse search engine results... the only thing I want to return from the SERPs is a list of the links from each page. For a typical Google search, that would be only 10 links.

I've gotten this far:

<?php 

$str = file_get_contents("http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS222US222&q=leaf+frogs&btnG=Search");
preg_match_all("/<a +href *= *[\"']? *([^\"' >]*)/i", $str, $allurls); 
$links = $allurls[1];

for ($i=0; $i<count($links); $i++) {
echo htmlentities($links[$i]) . "<br>\n";
}

?>

You'll see that it correctly returns ALL links from the page. Now I need to parse out only the 10 links to the actual results from the search query.

Can anyone help me please? I appreciate it...

[NogDog]

You need to look at the HTML source code of the page being parsed and determine what in that text can be used to differentiate the links you want from those you do not. It might an attribute of the link tags themselves, or it might be something about the HTML tags around them, or a particular sequence of HTML tags or attributes. Then you can use the selected HTML source code patterns to narrow your regular expression's selection criteria. Using parenthesized sub-patterns around the actual text of interest that you want to extract can then allow you to grab just the links by referencing the applicable array index of your $allurls array.