Extract data PHP string

Question

I have used file_get_contents() to basically get the source code of a site into a single string variable.

The source contains many rows that looks like this: <td align="center"><a href="somewebsite.com/something">12345</a></td>

(and a lot of rows that don't look like that). I want to extract all the idnumbers (12345 above) and put them in an array. How can I do that? I assume I want to use some kind of regular expressions and then use the preg_match_all() function, but I'm not sure how...

Oh good Google, not another one. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454 — Zirak, Apr 20 '11 at 19:45

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 20 '11 at 19:49

Don't mess with regular expressions. Get the variable and let a DOM library do the mundane tasks for you. Take a look at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/simplehtmldom/

Then you can traverse your HTMl like a tree and extract stuff. If you really want to get funky, read up on xPath.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 20 '11 at 20:01

1

Try this:

preg_match('/>[0-9]+<\/a><\/td>/', $str, $matches);
for($i = 0;$i<sizeof($matches);$i++)
 $values[] = $matches[$i];

answered Apr 20 '11 at 20:01

SIFE

5,567
7
32
46

Thanks! This gave me a basic idea, I went with preg_match_all('/[0-9]+<\/a><\/td>/', $html, $matches); return $matches[0]; Works perfetly! – faximan Apr 20 '11 at 20:16

Extract data PHP string

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