Question

I have multiple PHP strings (10-100k characters each) and want to get exact elements with their children from them.

Example:

$bbc_string = file_get_contents('http://www.bbc.co.uk/');
echo $bbc_string;

Gives 90544 characters and displays the whole page. But who needs the whole page, including navigation, footer etc.?

What if I want to display only, let’s say:

<div id="news_container">
   everything in it
</div>

Or:

<h2 id="worldService_title">
   everything in it
</h2>

How to filter or parse $bbc_string output to show what I want?

I think regex is the solution, I’ve found this pattern:

preg_match('/<div id=\"".$id."\">(.*?)</div>/', $string, $matches);

But it doesn’t work and is supposed to work only for divs not all elements.

Any PHP/regex ninjas around?

Answer 1

You should use DOM to parse HTML.