[RESOLVED] str_replace syntax : help!

ungovernable

ok i'm really a newbie with str_replace.... i know how to use the function, but i'm stuck at trying to find the correct syntax

i have a bunch of links like this:

<a href="http://mysite.com/glossary.php?do=viewglossary&term=208"' onmouseover="glossary_ajax_showTooltip('http://mysite.com/glossary_crosslinking.php?do=crosslink&term=208',this,true);return false" onmouseout="glossary_ajax_hideTooltip()">Blablabla</a>

I only want to keep the part in bold

i have tryed with this code but it returns a blank result:

preg_match_all("#glossary_ajax_hideTooltip()\">(.*)</a>#Ui", $value, $gmatches);
$nmatches = $gmatches[1];

foreach ($nmatches as $nvalue) {
echo $nvalue;
}

ungovernable

bump............

bradgrafelman

Try this pattern:

/<span class="glossarycrosslinkimage"><b><a [^>]+>([^<]+)/

Then again, whenever someone asks about mining data from HTML using regular expressions, there's almost always a better way to go about getting what they want.

If this is your site, why are you mining the HTML for data? Why not query the source directly (if it's a DBMS, for example)?

If it's a complete HTML document, you might look at using DOM instead to parse the document and navigate to the nodes you desire; this is a more robust solution that usually won't break just because someone adds a space or a different style attribute (situations where regular expressions tend to fail).

ungovernable

thanks , it works, but it will also remove the rest of my text

i don't know how to explain, so i will give an exemple:

the full text looks like this:

text text
 
 
more text....
 
<a href="http://mysite.com/glossary.php?do=viewglossary&term=208"' onmouseover="glossary_ajax_showTooltip('http://mysite.com/glossary_crosslinking.php?do=crosslink&term=208',this,true);return false" onmouseout="glossary_ajax_hideTooltip()">Blablabla</a>

 
text text text
 
still more text....

i'm looking for a result like this:

text text
 
 
more text....
 
Blablabla
 
text text text
 
still more text....

ungovernable

bump

nrg_alpha

You need preg_replace, not preg_match_all...

Example:

$value = <<<HTML
text text
<br>
<br>
more text....
<br><br>
<span class="glossarycrosslinkimage"><b><a href="http://mysite.com/glossary.php?do=viewglossary&amp;term=208"' onmouseover="glossary_ajax_showTooltip('http://mysite.com/glossary_crosslinking.php?do=crosslink&term=208',this,true);return false" onmouseout="glossary_ajax_hideTooltip()">Blablabla</b></a></span>
<br><br>
text text text
<br><br>
still more text....
HTML;

echo $value . "<br /><br /><br />\n\n\n";
$value = preg_replace('#<span class="glossarycrosslinkimage">.*?<a[^>]+onmouseout="glossary_ajax_hideTooltip\(\)"[^>]*>([^<]+).*?</a></span>#i', '$1', $value);
echo $value;

Output:

text text
<br> 
<br> 
more text....
<br><br> 
Blablabla
<br><br> 
text text text
<br><br> 
still more text....

So this looks for , then anything up to the anchor tag. The requirement here is that the anchor tag has - onmouseout="glossary_ajax_hideTooltip()" in it, otherwise the pattern will fail. If the main thing to look for is the with an anchor tag within it (where the attributes within this anchor tag doesn't matter), the pattern can be simplified to:

#<span class="glossarycrosslinkimage">.*?<a[^>]+>([^<]+).*?</a></span>#i

ungovernable

thanks a lot, it works perfectly and i understand better how the syntax works!! it was very useful for me