How do keep only text inside a list?

[Jeffro]

(If this is a regex question and should be moved, I apologize.. wasn't sure since I don't know the answer)

If my $description is the following, how would I strip away all the stuff before the list and after it and keep only the contents of the ul?:

 

random text.. blah blah blah..

more text.. blah blah

 

• list item 1
  
• list item 2
  
• list item 3
  

 

random text.. blah blah blah..

more text.. blah blah

 

[fugix]

you could use a combination of trim(), strpos(), and substr() to select the code of the list

[sunfighter]

This was just done over the weekend. It will yield results that can be displayed in a html file:

<?php
$garbage = 'just some bs <ul><li>text</li><li>text</li><li>text</li></ul>just some more bs';
preg_match_all('/<ul>(.*?)<\/ul>/i', $garbage, $matches);
echo $matches[0][0];
?>

 

$matches[1][0];  will not include the <ul> tags. And with a little work you could get rid of the <li> tags also.

[fugix]

you could also echo out the $matches in a foreach loop

[Jeffro]

Thx to all!  Sunfighter's code did the trick perfectly for me!