Text Parsing

[ilikemath2002]

Can I use cURL instead of file_get_contents? It would look something like this:

<?php
SOMECURLCODE
$data = curl_exec($ch);
$regex = '/Page 1 of (.+?) results/';
preg_match($regex,$data,$match);
var_dump($match);
echo $match[1];
?>

 

Also, how do I change this source to be used as $regex:

<span class="billing funorb">
<span class="credits"><b>(.+?)</b><br />Days</span>

[.josh]

Can I use cURL instead of file_get_contents? It would look something like this:

 

Yes you can use curl, but it is meant for real interaction between two servers.  Like, if you want to send data to a server's form and get the data generated from the response.  That sort of thing.  If you're just scraping the page, curl is making it more complicated than it needs to be.  Stick with file_get_contents.

 

Also, how do I change this source to be used as $regex:

<span class="billing funorb">
<span class="credits"><b>(.+?)</b><br />Days</span>

 

Don't quite understand what you mean...are you saying you want to grab the stuff between the bold tags?

 

// may or may not need the 's' modifier, depending on if boundaries will be on multiple lines or not
$regex = '~<span class="credits"><b>(.+?)</b>~s';
preg_match($regex,$data,$match);

 

[ilikemath2002]

Thanks CV, that's what I needed, I thought it would need \ or something before the tags.

[.josh]

Thanks CV, that's what I needed, I thought it would need \ or something before the tags.

 

Just depends on what delimiter you are using for the pattern.  For instance, if I chose / as my pattern delimiter, I would have to escape any /'s in the pattern, like this:

 

"/<span class="credits"><b>(.+?)<\/b>/s"

so the regex engine knows that that / for the closing b tag isn't the end of the pattern.