Hash Key?

[shahrukh1]

need to extract the hash value from this string

 

id="Qform__FormState" value="c49c31100c139a92a85a1dc37fb399c5"

 

proposed expression:

$expression = '#^([a-z0-9]{32})$#i';

 

does not work

 

tried this one as well

$expression = '#id=\"Qform__FormState\" value=\"^([a-z0-9]{32})$\"#i';

no luck either

[Jessica]

Hashes are one way. Sooooo... Too bad.

[Jessica]

Or if you're saying you want to get the actual hash, then use a Dom parser.

[shahrukh1]

no i just need that value tag from a webpage

there is a snippet from the webpage

[requinix]

DOMdocument. getElementById() then the "value" attribute of that element.

[.josh]

The most immediate reason why your regex is failing is because ^ and $ tell the regex engine to match the beginning and end of string. So in other words, you are telling the regex engine that the whole string must be that hash, nothing else. If you remove those anchors, you will get it to match. However... it will match any 32 alphanumeric substring within the content you are scraping. Ideally you should use a DOM parser like requinix suggested, but if you really must go the regex route, this will work and is fairly flexible:

 

$expression='#(id\s*=\s*["\']Qform__FormState["\'][^>]*)?([a-z0-9]{32})(?(1)|[^>]*id\s*=\s*["\']Qform__FormState["\'])#i';

 

This will allow for some format variation tolerances: random spacing, order of attributes, and quotes.

 

The matched hash will be in $match[2]