Get everything between - PHP

Question

I have got this string :

<form action="../?x=3O1*qY*E-dEItGGem1mH3VN5Nm6cO0hiQkOl0nSasIQqTDPzbSUbCI3UYWGGhwZ0" id="id8" method="post">

And i would like to get just the string inside the action attribute as follow :

../?x=3O1*qY*E-dEItGGem1mH3VN5Nm6cO0hiQkOl0nSasIQqTDPzbSUbCI3UYWGGhwZ0

I have tried many regexes, but they did not work.

preg_match('|<form action="../?x=(.+?)" id="id8" method="post">|', $output, $matches)

show us what you tried, and we'll be able to tell you why they didn't work. — Paul Dixon, Nov 03 '15 at 17:51
Is that a string or just HTML?In case its HTML use DOM parser — Mihai, Nov 03 '15 at 17:53
`/?` will match 0 or 1 `/` chars, and the `..` will match anything, including the intended periods. Try `\.\./\?` — Paul Dixon, Nov 03 '15 at 17:59

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 03 '15 at 18:00

Does the string include the closing tag and the other necessary tags to make it proper HTML? If so, try loading it into DOMElement and operating on it from there, something like this:

$dom = new DomDocument;
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = FALSE;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$forms = $dom->getElementsByTagName('form'); // Find Forms
foreach ($forms as $form){
    echo $form->getAttribute('action');
}

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:29

Take a look at this post : Get substring between two strings PHP

For your special case, I would suggest you to do as follow :

function get_string_between($string, $start, $end){
    $string = ' ' . $string;
    $ini = strpos($string, $start);
    if ($ini == 0) return '';
    $ini += strlen($start);
    $len = strpos($string, $end, $ini) - $ini;
    return substr($string, $ini, $len);
}

$fullstring = '<form action="../?x=3O1*qY*E-dEItGGem1mH3VN5Nm6cO0hiQkOl0nSasIQqTDPzbSUbCI3UYWGGhwZ0" id="id8" method="post">';
$parsed = get_string_between($fullstring, 'action="', '"');

echo $parsed; // result

You can also use a DOMParser :

$html = '<form action="../?x=3O1*qY*E-dEItGGem1mH3VN5Nm6cO0hiQkOl0nSasIQqTDPzbSUbCI3UYWGGhwZ0" id="id8" method="post">';
$d = new DomDocument();
$d>loadHTML($html);
$forms = $d->getElementsByTagName('form');
foreach ($forms as $key => $f){
    echo $f->getAttribute('action');
}

EDIT : As suggested by Mikel Bitson, the DomParser method is cleaner and will work if there is more than one form.

This answer is solid as far as finding a string between two characters. That being said, what happens if there are more than one form elements in the HTML? Injecting this into a DOMDocument will allow you to operate on it as HTML elements. EDIT: Now I see you've added the DOM option. — Mikel Bitson, Nov 03 '15 at 18:01

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

1

Firstly, if you're parsing HTML, you can use the built in DOM parser as suggested by Mikel Bitson's answer.

The reason your |<form action="../?x=(.+?)" id="id8" method="post">| regex doesn't work is mainly that first ? which needs to be escaped. Yyou should really escape those wildcard matches too if you really want to match two periods.

That would give you something like |<form action="\.\./\?x=(.+?)" id="id8" method="post">|

or, if you simply want the entire URL, |<form action="([^"]+)" id="id8" method="post">|

edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

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answered Nov 03 '15 at 18:02

Paul Dixon

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or better yet, `action="([^"]+)"` considering that the OP wants to get that value. – hjpotter92 Nov 03 '15 at 18:03

Get everything between - PHP

3 Answers3