Extracting text

[stephen]

Is it possible to take a page that is already created with HTML and pull certain sections of the page to create a new dynamic page with PHP?

Ex: The HTML page is already completed and I would like copy and paste selected information to a new dynamic page.

I seen a site that was doing this with ASP and was wondering if PHP could do something the same.

Thanks

[[deleted]]

Ofcourse you can.
You can open files, parse them and close them.
Check out the manual about filesystem functions.

[stephen]

I have looked over the manual and still a little bit confused.

In order to read the HTML I must use
fopen
fget
fclose

Could you help explain this to me in a little more detail on the logic and code behind this.

thanks

[pnoeric]

Stephen - I'm not sure exactly what you want your program to do, but generally speaking, you can extract text from any file (.html, .txt, or even an HTML file at an http:// address) by opening it with fopen, reading it into variable(s), closing the file, then doing what you need to do with the data you read. Does this help? If not, give more specifics about what you are trying to do.

best,
Eric Mueller

[stephen]

Thanks, this is starting to make sence. I'll be more exact and tell you exactly what I plan on doing.

I have a html pages that are generated from a visual basic program but would like to display the content in my own way.

They are very basic and most of the text I want is within the <PRE> tags so basically its all copy and past. There is the odd link here and there that I will need to change but that shouldn't be a problem.

thanks for all the help

[pnoeric]

Ok, now I get it. What it sounds like you need is a program that does four things:

1. Open the .html files that the VB program writes out.

2. Read it into variables and close the file.

3. Parse that raw data to get the info you want (the stuff between the <PRE> tags, for example)

4. Display the information

Does that help? Depending on how the HTML file is formatted, the trickiest part of what you want to do is actually probably going to end up being step 3; you'll want to look into regular expressions or you can even do the parsing with judicial and creative use of "explode" statements.

best,
Eric Mueller

[cvincent]

Instead of using fopen, fget, fclose just do something like $contents = file("/path/to/file"); and $contents will be an array, each element is one line of the file you specified. replace the file() call with include() if you want a string instead of an array.

-Chris

[[deleted]]

huh? $contents=include("file")?
don't you mean:
$data=fread($filepointer,filesize("filename"));?

[stephen]

I am really glad to be getting all this help and I am new to php as you can tell but now I am confused again.

What Chris is saying that I can store the html page one line at a time into an array and then re-display the lines I want. Am I correct when I say that?

Is it possible to give me a quick example of what the code will look like from start to finish just to set me off on the right track to get this to work.

thanks

[pnoeric]

Stephen-- I strongly urge some experimentation here... try writing a new PHP program that does nothing but read a text file from disk into an array. When you can make that run without any errors (hint: the code is less than ten lines and you can find it in the member-contributed errata at php.net), then try adding a piece of code to display the array. (Again, php.net/array will give you lots of hints and even code snippets to do the trick.) It's the best way to learn and you'll find the answer quick, I promise...

best,
Eric

[stephen]

Thanks to all for their help and I am now looking through the manual errata at php.net but it is very big and makes me wonder just where to start

hate to be a pain but I am not sure at all on this topic.

[skrana]

How can html page be converted to "txt"
file without htmltags before using
$content = file ('/path../'); ?

Chris wrote:

Instead of using fopen, fget, fclose just do something like $contents = file("/path/to/file"); and $contents will be an array, each element is one line of the file you specified. replace the file() call with include() if you want a string instead of an array.

-Chris