Bug with symbols

AndyGB

I have come across a bug in my code which needs fixing but I am at a loss as to how fix.

I am extracting html from another site using cURL, which works for 99% of the pages pulled. However as you can see from the html code below, the site are actually using the < symbol instead of < which means my code it interpreting that as a open bracket.

			<div class="profileheadcontent">
				<span class="txtGrey size15">
					31
					year old
					Female,
					< 5' (< 152 cm),
					Christian - other
				</span>
			</div>

Any suggests? ( If anyone suggests using DOM I will go mad! )

NogDog

Well...for the specific example you provided:

$html = str_replace_all('< ', '&lt; ', $html);

Of course, since the page is invalid HTML to begin with, who knows if they have "< p>" tags somewhere? 😉

AndyGB

Sorry but that isn't working to work.

By replacing all the < symbols in $html variable, this means the html parser won't work.
I need to replace just those 2, not the entire html

AndyGB

Oh wait a second, I didn't see the space after the <

Having checked all the html there are only two instances of the '< ' so that might work 😉

I'll give it a go, thanks!

AndyGB

I've got it working, thanks for the suggestion.

P.S str_replace_all isn't a valid function 😉

NogDog

AndyGB;11049311 wrote:
I've got it working, thanks for the suggestion.

P.S str_replace_all isn't a valid function 😉

Yeah, I started with preg_replace_all() -- which is incorrect but close to preg_match_all() -- then decided str_replace() would be sufficient for the simplest case, and just didn't quite ever get it completely right. 🙂 But apparently it was enough info for you. 😉

sneakyimp

You can get really precise with your preg_match patterns.

$pattern = '/<[^<>]+>/'; // only matches < followed by a > with no intervening < or >