Get Text between 1 group of Tags with PHP

[Jumpy09]

Alright so I am coding a site for a customer and I am currently in the News, wanting to show a list of the last 25 posts.  I am allowing direct HTML input as the Admin area is the only place to log-in and won't be accepting any content posted by their users.

 

So when the customer creates news, he must use <p></p> and <ul><li></li></ul> respectively to layout the news as he wants it to be.  The problem is I only really want to display the first 150 characters or so of the news topics in the News Listing.

 

I've googled this, and found a few methods but none of them really stick.

 

So what do I want to do?

Since the customer has to put paragraphs in <p></p> I want to take all the text out of the first paragraph, and the first paragraph only.  Then run it through substr and cut down the number of characters, then I will place it in <p></p> tags hard coded in.

 

So how do I get the content from inside the first <p></p> tag only and not all text from all the <p></p> tags?

 

Hopefully that is clear enough, I am a bit tired.

[Jumpy09]

Customer decided to leave the news out, may just go with a Facebook Integrated Wall.

 

I'd still like to know how, just in case it ever comes up again; but I'm not relying on any answers.

[WebStyles]

you can do it with preg_match, although I'm not very good at that, so here's a simple suggestion:

 

assuming you have a variable named $newsArticle that contains the entire article:

 

// split it where the </p> is
$parts = explode("</p>",$newsArticle);
// grab the wanted part and discard the rest. It will be index 0 since it's the first paragraph
$wantedPart = $parts[0];
unset($parts);
// remove the <p> tag from the start:
$finalText = str_replace("<p>","",$wantedPart);

 

Kind of an old-fashioned way to do it, but it should work.

 

Hope this helps

[Jumpy09]

That is excellent, I have not actually gotten really use to the explode function yet.  Of course every once and a while something will slip right passed me, or I will forget something.

 

This actually will work really well, thank you very much.