HTML File Parsing

thekidscareya

I'm using file_get_contents() to grab data from multiple web servers where there aren't RSS type feeds available. I know I can use PHP's DomDocument class to parse out the data I want, but that can become tedious because there are multiple templates out there.

Is there a way where I can just pass in the following (simplified) code:

<div id="group">
<div id="subgroup_{$count}">
<p class="{$heading}">My Heading</p>
<a href="javascript:find({$value1}','{$value2}','{$value3}');">{$link}</a>
</div>
<div id="subgroup_{$count}">
<p class="{$heading}">My Heading</p>
<a href="javascript:find({$value1}','{$value2}','{$value3}');">{$link}</a>
</div>
</div>

and after executing some function x, receive 2D array with the first dimension size equivalent to the number of divs with id starting with "subgroup_"
and the second dimension size equivalent to the number of variables within the subgroup (here: 6) and contains the values parsed?

I hope I have communicated what I am trying to do clearly, but if not feel free to ask me to clarify. Thank you for your input.

Weedpacket

Uh, "templates"?

thekidscareya

Weedpacket;10925783 wrote:
Uh, "templates"?

templates as in different versions of the code I posted in the original post

Weedpacket

Well, you could write a translator to convert your templates into a regular expression that you pass to preg_match. It would do things like preg_quote() everything, replace {$foo} (actually, after quoting, it would be more like {\$foo}) with (?P<foo>(.*?)) and stick the '/' on the beginning and end and whatever flags are appropriate (I don't know but it will probably whinge about the same capturing ?P<foo> variable being used more than once if it is).

thekidscareya

I thought about something like that, but that could get very complicated very quickly. Would there be any other solutions out there? I'm looking for something along the lines of http://www.code-box.org/article/extracting-html-details-using-php, but simpler.