Question

I am trying to get some data out from a database stored as text usnig php.
The text could be plain text /or html text.

I want to fetch the following fields from the text retrieved from database : City, state, country.
Here is the example the text could look like

country :- US
state   :- Washington
city    :- Bellingham

or

<table>
<tr><td>country </td><td>US</td></tr>
<tr><td>state</td><td>Washington</td></tr>
<tr><td>city</td><td>Bingen</td></tr>
</table>

or same in div tag

I have already done for plain text.
which I found to be very easy as i found the linebreak (the end of line) and trimmed rest of the text except what was required

But in case of HTML I am facing the problem, how to deal with html text. As there is no line break . Not sure whats the best way to do this if I use strip_tags it returns all text in same line i.e. country us state washington

Answer 1

Can’t you just do some text processing instead of HTML parsing

$input = "<table><tr><td>country </td><td>US</td></tr><tr><td>state</td><td>Washington</td></tr><tr><td>city</td><td>Bingen</td></tr></table>";

$needle = array("<table>", "<tr><td>","</td<td>", "</td</tr>", "</table");
$replacements = array("","",":-","\n","");
$output = str_replace($needle, $replacements, $input);

This will give you the same as the text-input.