Extracting text out of HTML

Question

I'm updating my website to set the rDNS, however I'm here to ask your opinion on how this handle my issue. I have all IP's (IPv4) in a array called $aIP. Now I have a list like this:

<tr><td>1.2.3.4</td><td>hostname.bla.com</td><td><a href="edit-reverse.cgi?id=1">myserver.com</a></td></tr>
<tr><td>1.2.3.5</td><td>hostname.bla.com</td><td><a href="edit-reverse.cgi?id=2"><i>not set</i></a></td></tr>
<tr><td>1.2.3.6</td><td>hostname.bla.com</td><td><a href="edit-reverse.cgi?id=3"><i>not set</i></a></td></tr>
<tr><td>1.2.3.7</td><td>hostname.bla.com</td><td><a href="edit-reverse.cgi?id=4">test.myserver.com</a></td></tr>
<tr><td>1.2.3.8</td><td>hostname.bla.com</td><td><a href="edit-reverse.cgi?id=5"><i>not set</i></a></td></tr>
<tr><td>1.2.3.9</td><td>hostname.bla.com</td><td><a href="edit-reverse.cgi?id=6"><i>not set</i></a></td></tr>

Now I need the current rDNS value (in this case either myserver.com or not set or test.myserver.com) and I need the value or the complete url which it links to (edit-reverse.cgi?id=1 or 1) which is linked to the IP address in the array $aIP.

This would be the expected output (not especially in this output format rather be in an array or something):

1.2.3.4 => 1, myserver.com
1.2.3.5 => 2, not set
1.2.3.6 => 3, not set
1.2.3.7 => 4, test.myserver.com
1.2.3.8 => 5, not set
1.2.3.9 => 6, not set

Please bear in mind that not all IP addresses I have might be in the $aIP array, so basically it should loop through the HTML code and search for the values according to the $aIP array.

I was thinking about using regex but then I don't know a lot about them so it would probably be very inefficient code. What would be the best way to handle this?

Have you considered using an HTML parser to parse this HTML? — Borealid, Feb 20 '12 at 19:20
What you do NOT want to do is use regular expressions. Here's why: http://htmlparsing.com/regexes — Andy Lester, Mar 07 '14 at 03:34

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 20 '12 at 21:28

I've found a perfect solution, using native functions:

/*** a new dom object ***/ 
$dom = new domDocument; 

/*** load the html into the object ***/ 
$dom->loadHTML($html); 

/*** discard white space ***/ 
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false; 

/*** the table by its tag name ***/ 
$tables = $dom->getElementsByTagName('table'); 

/*** get all rows from the table ***/ 
$rows = $tables->item(0)->getElementsByTagName('tr'); 

/*** loop over the table rows ***/ 
foreach ($rows as $row) 
{ 
    /*** get each column by tag name ***/ 
    $cols = $row->getElementsByTagName('td'); 
    /*** echo the values ***/ 
    echo $cols->item(0)->nodeValue.'<br />'; 
    echo $cols->item(1)->nodeValue.'<br />'; 
    echo $cols->item(2)->nodeValue; 
    echo '<hr />'; 
}

Found at http://www.phpro.org/examples/Parse-HTML-With-PHP-And-DOM.html

Thanks all.

Extracting text out of HTML

1 Answers1