Regular Expression not Returning anything

Miteshsach86

Hi fellow developers,

I'm having a real problem at the moment, I'm trying to capture everything in between <body></body> tags using the following code but it does not print anything:

$lines = file("http://www.bbc.co.uk/");

foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) {
$thecontent .= htmlspecialchars($line) . "<br />\n";
}
preg_match('/<body.?>(.?)<\/body >/', $thecontent, $htmltext);
$moretext = $htmltext[1];
echo $moretext;

When you do place a "print($thecontent);" into the code the entire html for [whatever the website] does display but I want to capture only the html code in between the body tags. I've tried everything but I just can't get this to work. :queasy:

I would appreciate anyone's help and I'd like to thank you in advance.

NogDog

I won't claim it's the only issue, but don't do the htmlspecialchars() before the regexp stuff, or else there won't be any "<" or ">" to find in the string. 😉

Also, you could just use file_get_contents() to get the text from the file, instead of file() and all that looping.

Miteshsach86

Hi NagDog,

Thanks for your reply. I added thoses changes into my code and now it just displays an empty Array. The code now looks like this:

$thecontent = file_get_contents("http://www.bbc.co.uk/");
preg_match('/<body.?>(.?)<\/body >/', $thecontent, $htmltext);
$moretext = $htmltext[1];
echo $moretext;

Once again, I would appreciate someone's help and I'd like and thank you in advance.

NogDog

Try an "s" modifier (after the closing regexp delimiter) so that ".*" will include newlines.

jgetner

try this


$Invokefile = 'http://www.bbc.co.uk';

$Regmatch = '/<body.*?>(.*?)<\/body >/';

$matchesArray;

$Match;

while(file_get_contents($Invokefile)!==FALSE)
{  

     $Match = preg_match_all($Regmatch , $Invokefile , $MatchesArray);

 foreach($MatchesArray as $matched)
 {
      foreach($matched as $value)
      {
        echo $value;
      }
 }
}

Here is the proper code for such a process. But your regex is wrong and doesn't return the proper values. Aslo you must set the max execution time higher as this little process is very slow and will exceed the allotted time of 60 seconds.

Miteshsach86

Thanks for all your help guys!

Much appreciated 🙂