Extract tag contents in PHP

Question

Say I have a WordPress post, and certain words are wrapped in span tags.

For example:

<p>John went to the <span>bakery</span> today,
and after picking up his favourite muffin
he made his way across to the <span>park</span>
and spent a couple hours on the <span>swings</span>
with his friends.</p>

Is then then a way using PHP to dynamically spit them (the words in the span tags) out as an ordered list in my template file?

Like so:

<h3>What John Did Today</h3>
<ol>
<li>bakery</li>
<li>park</li>
<li>swings</li>
</ol>

If someone could point be in the right direction of how to do something like this, it would be much appreciated. Thank you.

You could use Javascript to go through the DOM and spit out the formatted text into a div. — Rasika, Jun 23 '11 at 01:04

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 23 '11 at 01:07

$str = '<p>John went to the <span>bakery</span> today, and after picking up his favourite muffin     he made his way across to the <span>park</span> and spent a couple hours on the <span>swings</span> with his friends.</p>';

$d = new DomDocument;
$d->loadHTML($str);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($d);
echo "<h3>What John Did Today</h3>\n";
echo "<ol>\n";
foreach ($xpath->query('//span') as $span)
  echo "<li>".$span->nodeValue."</li>\n";
echo "</ol>\n";

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 23 '11 at 01:03

0

A simple possibility is using regular expressions, take a look at preg_match function

answered Jun 23 '11 at 01:03

Wanderson Silva

1,179
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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 23 '11 at 01:05

0

Parse the DOM :

http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/

answered Jun 23 '11 at 01:05

Spyros

46,820
25
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Jason Rogers · Answer 4 · 2011-06-23T11:46:15.707

I'm not a regex whiz but this SHOULD do the job for replacing <span> tags with <li> tags:

$str = preg_replace("/<span>([^[]*)<\/span>/i", "<li>$1</li>", $str);

..i know this doesn't directly answer your question but it should help you with this at some point lol

EDIT: full actually working regex solution for getting all your span tags into an array and converting to list items at the same time:

// input string:
$str = '<span>Walk</span> blah <span>Drive</span> blah blee blah <span>Eat</span>';

// get array of span matches
preg_match_all("/(<span>)(.*?)(<\/span>)/i", $str, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

// build array using the exact matches
foreach($matches as $val){
    $spanArray[] = preg_replace("/<span>([^[]*)<\/span>/i", "<li>$1</li>", $val[0]);
}

if you then print_r($spanArray); you should get something that looks like this:

Array
(
    [0] => <li>Walk</li> 
    [1] => <li>Drive</li> 
    [2] => <li>Eat</li> 
)

I just want to caution that, [you shouldn't use regex for html parsing](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/7613) — Andrew, Jan 18 '12 at 17:56

Extract tag contents in PHP

4 Answers4