Regex, why double array?

[Ninjakreborn]

<?php

$url = file_get_contents('http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu5jCGDhIk6gAr6pXNyoA?p=link:' . $domain);

$preg = preg_match_all("=<span class\=\"url\">(.*)</span>=siU", $url, $results);

?>

 

This simply goes and get's everything from a string where <span class="url">whatever</span>

it grabs everything in the span tags. This works great..but why is it doubling the array?

It returns $results as $array[0] and $array[1] with 0 and 1 both having a duplicate..so all of 0 has the text I want

but the same text is in 1..why did it create it that way?

 

More trying to figure this out so I can understand Regular Expressions better.

[wildteen88]

If you look in the source you'll see, you'll have two distinctive arrays,

 

$array[0] will contain both the html and urls, eg

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => <span class="url">http://some url here</span>
             .... rest of matches
        )
)

Where as $array[1] will just contains the urls (what you're searching for (.*)), eg

Array
(
    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => http://some url here
             .... rest of matches
        )
)

 

Hope that helps to understand what preg_match_all is doing

[Ninjakreborn]

Very much so, thank you very much.

Oh and Wildteen, I have not seen you in forever. It's not to see you around here again.

Hope things are doing well for you.

Thanks again for the help. I am really trying to jump into this Regex stuff, finally starting to write some of my

own. After all this time I finally find out it's very helpful with some of the stuff I have had to do.

 

Thanks again.

[Ninjakreborn]

<?php
$temp = preg_match_all("\bInlinks\b \(([:digit:])\)", $url, $test);
?>

OK I can't get this to work. I want to take a look at a giant string and return 1 instance of this

"Inlinks (123)"  The 123 could be replaced by whatever number of how many results. 

I am having a strange error like

Warning: preg_match_all() [function.preg-match-all]: Delimiter must not be alphanumeric or backslash in /users1/functions.php on line 51

I tried the above regular expression also without the \b's around the text because I thought you could directly match using a word or something.

 

So when the Regex finds the words Inlinks followed by a set of numbers in parenthesis I want to grab those numbers.  My logic flow for this was

match the word Inlinks followed by () (which is why I escaped the first set) then get any numeric characters inside that. But instead I get this

error.  Any advice would be apreciated.

[wildteen88]

You forgot the delimiters (they define the start/end of your regex pattern).

 

I tend to use ~ as the delimiters. You'll want to wrap [:digit:] within square brackets too, otherwise you'll receive an error. Also another change you'll need to add is the 1 or more quantifier (+ symbol) after [:digit:] to match one or more numbers, otherwise your pattern will only match a single digit and not multiple.

 

Fixed code

$temp = preg_match_all("~\bInlinks\b \(([[:digit:]+])\)~", $url, $test);

[Ninjakreborn]

OK I appreciate that. I made some notes about the delimiters and other things you said. I tried it and it wasn't working, so I cut it out into a test case

and it still wasn't working then reduced the pattern a little to try and make it more specific and it still wasn't working. Here is the current pattern and test case

<?php

$temp = preg_match_all("~\(([[:digit:]+])\)~", 'test whatever (1234) whatever test', $test);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($test);
echo '</pre>';
?>

I basically want to grab the numbers between (). So in this ist should just be start delimiter and then escape the ( and then inside that grab

all the digits and then unescape the other ) and close delimeter.  Any advice is appreciated.  This test case returns an empty array.  I will expand upon it myself to make sure

the Inlinks is in front of it after I get the test case working but there must be something I am doing wrong here.

 

Thanks again.

[wildteen88]

Woops my bad. I meant to say add the + operator after [[:digit:]], not [:digit:]. I forgot the extra []

[Ninjakreborn]

Oh ok. I got it adjusted and now it's even working with the Inlinks part as well.

Thanks again, I appreciate it.