help finding string

[denoteone]

how can I get what is between this tag?

 

<b class="yfi-price-change-down">122.42</b></span> <span id="yfs

 

I need to find the number in the middle of the above string? I think it is a regex but I am not able to figure it out.

[shadiadiph]

where is the number 122.42 originating from? does it change? if you are trying to copy it from a website its impossible without knowing the string that caused it

[Yesideez]

It's not impossible - just trying to access my web space so I can get some regex code...

 

EDIT: Just remembered I no longer have the code on my web space. At work and can't access my home PC from here

[syed]

Are you creating a data scraper?

[shadiadiph]

how can you scrape data from a webpage? I spent two hours trying earlier ??

[denoteone]

I am making a data scraper. and no the number will not always be the same.

[thebadbad]

Here ya go:

 

<?php
$str = '<b class="yfi-price-change-down">122.42</b></span> <span id="yfs';
preg_match('~class="yfi-price-change-down">([0-9.,]+)~i', $str, $matches);
echo $matches[1];
?>

 

Will match one or more (the plus) digits, dots or commas (character class: [0-9.,]) where you specified.

[thebadbad]

Note: If class="yfi-price-change-down"> appears more than one place in the source code, the script will only match the following number at the first place. So just tell me if it needs tweaking.

[denoteone]

"ChangeDown" => array("pattern" => "/<b class=\"yfi-price-change-down\">(.+?)<\/b>/", "value" => "N/A"),

 

this what i had but it is not working later in the script it checks the data and if it returns nothing I get "N/A"

 

[thebadbad]

That regex looks fine, so post all the relevant code, so we can see where it's failing.

[denoteone]

ok it looks as if 

<b class="yfi-price-change-down">GET THIS DATA</b>

 

appears more then once in the html. 

 

but if I look for

 

<b class="yfi-price-change-down">GET THIS DATA</b></span> <span id=>

 

that only appears once.  what would the regex be for that?

[thebadbad]

'~<b class="yfi-price-change-down">([0-9.,]+?)</b></span> <span id=~i'

 

If you want to match any characters instead of only digits, dots and commas, change ([0-9.,]+?) to (.+?).

But if it's not working, show us the part of your script where the match is actually searched for.

[shadiadiph]

is this for getting data from another site?

[denoteone]

yes it is for getting data from another site.

[thebadbad]

how can you scrape data from a webpage? I spent two hours trying earlier ??

 

Although you're topic hijacking: You can use file_get_contents() or cURL to store an external site's source code in a variable. Or use the function below; it uses cURL if installed, else file_get_contents() if allow_url_fopen is enabled on the server:

 

<?php
//store page in variable using cURL if available, else using file_get_contents()
//set user agent string
ini_set('user_agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; da; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0');
function store_page($url) {
if (function_exists('curl_init')) {
	$c = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
	curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
	$contents = curl_exec($c);
	curl_close($c);
	return $contents;
} elseif (ini_get('allow_url_fopen') == 1 && $contents = @file_get_contents($url)) {
	return $contents;
} else {
	die('Unable to crawl page. Be sure to have cURL installed or to have \'allow_url_fopen\' set to \'On\' in php.ini.');
}
}
?>

 

Then scrape the content you need by using regular expressions (via the preg_match() or preg_match_all() function). Writing complex regexes takes a lot of practice/experience.