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I have a HTML document with the a table which I want to replace, however I don't know what the content of the table will be so I need to search for the opening and closing table tags and then replace the content between them. I'm a bit of a n00b with regular expressions so I'm having trouble working out how to do this... any ideas?

Update: The HTML in question is available to me as a string and I'm not able to insert any extra data or change the HTML in any way... I need to be able to search for a opening and closing pattern at the start and end of the table in the HTML and then replace the contents in-between. :)

Nathan Pitman
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  • If you are too lazy to use the search function, I am too lazy to find the duplicate, but be assured it is in there: http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3A208809+replace+DOM – Gordon Jul 24 '10 at 13:06
  • I'm not too lazy to use the search function, I just didn't find any previous questions and answers that gave me what I needed. :) – Nathan Pitman Jul 24 '10 at 14:04
  • second link in the linked search results and Wrikken's answer should give you all you need. – Gordon Jul 24 '10 at 14:31
  • possible duplicate of [PHP: Strip a specific tag from HTML string?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3308530/php-strip-a-specific-tag-from-html-string) – Wrikken Jul 24 '10 at 14:43

2 Answers2

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Do NOT use regular expressons for this, look into parsers. For instance, load the HTML in a DOMDocument instance, search the table with either DOMXPath or getElementsByTagName, and use the replaceNode or other manipulation functions. Doing it with regexes is usually very unreliable.

Wrikken
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  • I need to do this server side unfortunately but thanks for the suggestion. :) – Nathan Pitman Jul 24 '10 at 14:05
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    Parsing XML server side is what the XML functions of PHP are for. – Kwebble Jul 24 '10 at 14:12
  • Wow, ok... I didn't even realise this was possible.. sorry, I just assumed you had misunderstood my question. Will definitely have a look for a primer on native DOM manipulation with PHP. Thanks. :) – Nathan Pitman Jul 24 '10 at 14:24
  • ok, well I found a solution while in part uses the techniques you;ve suggested so thanks very much for that. As I have a large HTML string as a PHP variable it was easier to find the table in question using the DOM method you suggested, replace it with a placeholder node and then str_replace the placeholder node with the string contents. :) Thanks again! – Nathan Pitman Jul 24 '10 at 20:54
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Is the HTML document your own, or file_get_contents()ed from a another site? If the first, just change the HTML to 

<html>
 ...
<table>
    <?php echo $tableString ?>
</table>
 ...
</html>

and give it a .php or .inc extension. Then, in your main file:

<?php
    $tableString = calcTableContents();
    require('includedHTML.inc');
?>

No point parsing HTML if you don't have to.

Eric
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  • That is an interesting interpretation of the question. – Gordon Jul 24 '10 at 13:09
  • Often the asker of the question knows what they want, but follow the wrong route to get it. – Eric Jul 24 '10 at 13:15
  • Unfortunately I can't effect the HTML in any way before it's available to me as a string in PHP. In retrospect I now realise my original question lacked context so apologies for that. :) – Nathan Pitman Jul 24 '10 at 14:10