get file content

nuttynibbles

hi,

i understand we can use file_get_content to crawl / get the content of a website..
after doing so, can we remove some part of the html? for example, only capture navigaiton bar out of the entire html.

dagon

you can use regular expressions for that or look in to DOM. of course you have the sites permission to do this.

nuttynibbles

i was hoping not to hear DOM =D
tks dagon i try on that

halojoy

It is possible to capture the menu or some special code
from a HTML source, without using REGEX.
[man]preg_match/man using regular expression is of course more effective.

Using [man]strpos/man or [man]stripos/man
and considerably more lines of code .....

Example. HTML to search inside:

......some html source 
xxxxxx
<div id="menu">
<a href="...">link1</a>
<a href="...">link2</a>
<a href="...">link3</a>
</div>

<div id="main_contents">
abcdef
dfghjk

PHP. 'strpos_regex.php'

<?php // by halojoy March 2010

$html = '
......some html source 
xxxxxx
<div id="menu">
<a href="...">link1</a>
<a href="...">link2</a>
<a href="...">link3</a>
</div>

<div id="main_contents">
abcdef
dfghjk';

// Define what we are looking for
$start = '<div id="menu">';
$end   = '<div id="main_contents">';

// Search for start & end positions
$start_pos = strpos($html, $start);
$end_pos   = strpos($html, $end);
$length    = $end_pos - $start_pos;

// Cut out what is between start & end
$menu = substr($html, $start_pos, $length);
// Clean off leading/trailing spaces/newlines
$menu = trim($menu);

// Display or use the result
echo $html;
echo "\n<hr>\n";
echo $menu;

/* RESULT MENU OUTPUTS:
*************************
<div id="menu">
<a href="...">link1</a>
<a href="...">link2</a>
<a href="...">link3</a>
</div>
************************/

?>