Hi everyone.

I am looking through a web-page for important data which looks like this:

<a href="UniqueBeginWord.php?d=important data">UniqueEndWord</a>

I have been beating my head trying to recycle a regex to extract it, but it's not working.

Can anyone with experience in regex give me a hand trying to extrac the important data?

Note: important data contains the following: letters, numbers, colon marks (i.e. , less than sign (i.e. <) and more than sign (i.e. >).

Sample:

PHP Code:

$string = '<a href="UniqueBeginWord.php?d=first word;;408<br>second word;;409<br>third and fourth words;;461<br>fifth word;;156<br>last word;;212'>UniqueEndWord</a> 


Thanks.

This seems to work, correct me if I'm wrong.

PHP Code:

<?php

$url='<a href="Lumberjack.php?d=one<br>;;two<br>;;318">NorwegianBlue</a>';
$matches=Array();
$regex="#<a href=\"Lumberjack.php\?d=(.*?)\">NorwegianBlue#";

echo preg_match($regex,$url,$matches);
echo"<br />";
echo"<pre>".$matches[0]." ".$matches[1]."</pre>";

?>

Hi 0beron.

It works fine if the data is hardcoded, but when call the file remotely like this

$file = file_get_contents($url);

It doesn't. Any idea?

This is a wild guess - is it choking on html entities? By that I mean file_get_contents() gives you &gt; when you were expecting > ? I don't know quite how the get contents function behaves.

I agree with you that it is chocking on something.

Even when i try

$response = file_get_contents($url);
$position = strpos($reponse, "keyword");

I get nothing.

Do you know a known way of opening up a remote web page and then doing what we want to do?

OK. I got SOMETHING to work.

It might not be as beautiful as a regex, but it works
$result = file_get_contents($url);
$begin = strpos ($result, "firstword");
$finish = strpos ($result, "endword");
$results = substr ($result, $begin, ($finish-$begin));

Thanks.