Question

i have aproblem for a few days right now :s …
I’m trying to get some changing data inside a string, the string is something like this:

<docdata>
 <!-- News Identifier -->
        <doc-id id-string ="YBY15349" />

        <!-- Date of issue -->
        <date.issue norm ="2012-09-22 19:52" />
        <!-- Date of release -->
        <date.release norm ="2012-09-22 19:52" />
      </docdata>

What i need is only the date inside the “2012-09-22 19:52” , the string its stored in some type of xml, malformed by the way. So i can’t use normal xml parser, i load/read the file already to change some charset

    $fname = $file;
    $fhandle = fopen($fname,"r");
    $content = fread($fhandle,filesize($fname));
    str_replace("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>", "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"?>", $content); 
etc..

this work like a charm, but with the string i cant use it.
I try with preg_match_all but i can`t get it right.
Its there a simple way to search this value

<date.issue norm ="2012-09-22 19:52" />

and get just the date in a variable?

thanks in advance and sorry for my english.

Answer 1

From the PHP documentation:

file_get_contents() is the preferred way to read the contents of a file into a string. It will use memory mapping techniques if supported by your OS to enhance performance.

Consequently, your code would become:

$content = file_get_contents($file);
$content = str_replace("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>", "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"?>", $content);
preg_match_all('/date\.issue norm ="([^"]+)" /', $content, $date);

The default behavior is to store the parenthesized matches in the array $date[1]. Therefore, you might loop through $date[1][0], $date[1][1], and so on.