[SOLVED] Find all elements that match on a page

[citricsquid]

Hi,

 

I've been using explode to split the contents of a page for a while now, if I wanted to find "<span class="hello">hey there!</span>" on a page I'd just do "explode('<span class="hello">hey there!</span>', $page);" however now I'm in a position where "<span class="hello">hey there!</span>" appears multiple times on a page and I need to retrieve each one.

 

How would I go about doing this for multiple things? I'll give an example of the output I want to check:

 

<div class="something">Hi there!</div>
<div class="something">Hello!</div>
<div class="something">hi i am</div>
<div class="something">rofl</div>
<div class="something">dsfssdf</div>

 

and I want to get the contents of each <div class="something">. I assume this will require more than just using explode, regex maybe? I know how to get a single one using explode, but not multiple.

 

So the final result would be an array like:

 

$somethings[0] = "Hi there!";
$somethings[1] = "Hello!;
$somethings[2] = "hi i am";

 

any ideas?

 

[MadTechie]

Like this

<?php
$HTML = '<div class="something">Hi there!</div>
<div class="something">Hello!</div>
<div class="something">hi i am</div>
<div class="something">rofl</div>
<div class="something">dsfssdf</div>';
preg_match_all('%<div class="[^"]*">([^<]*)</div>%sm', $HTML, $somethings);
$somethings = $somethings[1];
var_dump($somethings);
?>

 

array(5) {

  [0]=>

  string(9) "Hi there!"

  [1]=>

  string(6) "Hello!"

  [2]=>

  string(7) "hi i am"

  [3]=>

  string(4) "rofl"

  [4]=>

  string(7) "dsfssdf"

}

[citricsquid]

This works perfectly, however if I want to go "more advanced" I'm sort of lost:

 

If I wanted to find EVERYTHING between <div class="something">{HERE}</div> how would I do it? Let's say, for example, I have:

 

<div class="something"><div id="rofl">dfssdffds</div><img src="lol.jpg"><a href="#">dfsffs</a></div>

 

and I want to match between

 

<div class="something"></div>

 

So I want it to return:

 

<div id="rofl">dfssdffds</div><img src="lol.jpg"><a href="#">dfsffs</a>

 

How would I match that? I tried playing around with it but I'm lost, any ideas?

 

Thanks for the help so far

[MadTechie]

change

preg_match_all('%<div class="[^"]*">([^<]*)</div>%sm', $HTML, $somethings);

to

preg_match_all('%<div class="[^"]*">(.*?)</div>%sim', $HTML, $somethings);

should do it, (untested)

[citricsquid]

works beautifully, thanks! I was missing out the ? before, regex is confusing.

 

Thanks ever so much for the help, solved and appreciated!

[MadTechie]

Welcome, RegEx gets easier with time, I'm teaching a guy at work, his slower getting to grips with it, but the first time i showed him.. it said "F*** that!" but when i updates his 20someting lines of broken code with 3 lines of working code.. he started pay attention.

[citricsquid]

Welcome, RegEx gets easier with time, I'm teaching a guy at work, his slower getting to grips with it, but the first time i showed him.. it said "F*** that!" but when i updates his 20someting lines of broken code with 3 lines of working code.. he started pay attention.

 

heh, yeah, I'm a sort of "hmm, that does look very hard but I guess it'll save me time..." then end up quitting because it's too complicated for my non-programmer brain to handle

 

on that note, can't get adding new lines to work now. by default . ignores new lines, but mine has new lines and adding /s (the modifier) doesn't seem to work. Damn you regex!