Reading HTML unordered list into multidimensional array

[deoanam]

Hello everyone! I'm a newb here, and I've stumbled upon a puzzle that my meager PHP skills haven't been able to crack. It seems simple enough, though... any hints would be very much appreciated.

 

I have some software (Wordpress, actually) that is sending HTML code of an unordered list when I call a particular function.

 

I want to make that list into a multidimensional array. So something like this:

   <li>1</li>
   <li>2</li>
        <ul>
             <li>2.1</li>
             <li>2.2</li>
        </ul>
   <li>3</li>

 

Will turn into this:

[0] => 1
[1] => 2
[3] => array
              [0] => 2.1
              [1] => 2.2
[4]=>3

 

Well, you get the idea...

 

I'm trying to avoid a solution where I have to go through the string character by character and perform complex analyses on them. This is actually going to be the basis of a drop-down menu navigation system and so I can't have it taking up too much processing overhead.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Thanks so much!

 

All the best,

Matt

[btherl]

If the html format is stable and simple (as it appears to be), you can get away with something like this for each line:

 

if (preg_match('|<li>([^<]+)</li>|', $line, &$matches) === 1) {
  print "Matched {$matches[1]}\n";
}

 

While preg_match() may not be as fast as using low-level string manipulation, it's still quite fast, it's simpler and more flexible.

 

The other option is doing full HTML parsing, but I don't think it's necessary in your situation.

[deoanam]

Thanks for your response. Unfortunately, perhaps I don't know what to do with what you gave me because I couldn't seem to get it to do anything helpful 

 

However, I realized that I made a mistake in articulating what I was looking for...

 

For this unordered list:

<li>1</li>
<li>2
        <ul>
             <li>2.1</li>
             <li>2.2
             <ul>
                   <li>2.2.1</li>
             </ul>
             </li>
        </ul>
        </li>
<li>3</li>

 

Instead of this:

[0] => 1
[1] => 2
[3] => array
              [0] => 2.1
              [1] => 2.2
              [2] => array
                      [0] => 2.2.1
[4]=>3

 

I really wanted something like this:

[0] => 1
[1] => 2
[3] => array
              [0] => 2.1
              [1] => 2.2 array
                      [0] => 2.2.1
[4]=>3

 

 

But you'll notice that on key [1], I have stupidly defined the value as a number AND an array (which is naughty... well, impossible, really).

 

So I had an idea - what if I used the array's keys to contain the data. That way I could get something like this:

[<li>1</li>] => 
[<li>2</li>] => array
              [<li>2.1</li>] => 
              [<li>2.2</li>] => array
                       [<li>2.2.1</li>]
[<li>3</li>]=>

 

So I tried this:

$navlist0 = wp_list_pages('title_li=&sort_column=menu_order&echo=0&depth=3');
$delimiter = "\n";

$navlist1 = explode($delimiter, $navlist0); 
array_pop($navlist1);

$navlist2 = array();
$number_of_keys = count($navlist1);

foreach ($navlist1 as $key => $value) {
$navlist1[$key] = trim($value);
}

for ($i = 0; $i < $number_of_keys; $i++) {
$value_1 = $navlist1[$i];
//SECOND LEVEL
if ( substr($navlist1[$i], 0, 3) == '<ul' ){
	$i++;
	while (substr($navlist1[$i], 0, 4) != '</ul' ) {
		//THIRD LEVEL
		$value_2 = $navlist1[$i];
		if ( substr($navlist1[$i], 0, 3) == '<ul' ){
			$i++;
			while (substr($navlist1[$i], 0, 4) != '</ul' ) {
				$value_3 = $navlist1[$i];
				echo "3";
				$navlist2[$value_1][$value_2][$value_3] = NULL;
				$i++;
			}
			$i+2;
		}
		//////////////
		echo "2";
		$navlist2[$value_1][$value_2] = NULL;
		$i++;
	}
	$i+2;
}
/////////////////
echo "1";
$navlist2[$value_1] = NULL;
}
echo "<br />VALUE 3: $value_3<br />";

print_r($navlist1);
echo "This is navlist:" . chr(13);
print_r($navlist2);

 

But it dinna work. It seems to only output the first level and dispenses with the rest.

Anybody see anything incredibly obvious to prove my stupidity? This would be the one time I'd be grateful for such a proof.

 

Cheers,

Matt

 

 

[deoanam]

The answer to this question is here: http://mysrc.blogspot.com/2007/02/php-xml-to-array-and-backwards.html