Question

I want to include an external file, and then get all the content, remove the only HTML on the page <br /> and replace with , and fire it into an array.

datafeed.php

john_23<br />
john_5<br />
john_23<br />
john_5<br />

grabber.php

<?php
// grab the url
include("http://site.com/datafeed.php");

//$lines = file('http://site.com/datafeed.php);

// loop through array, show HTML source as HTML source.
foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) {

    // replace the <br /> with a ,
    $removeBreak = str_replace("<br />",",", $removeBreak);
    $removeBreak = htmlspecialchars($line);
    // echo $removeBreak;
}

// fill our array into string called SaleList
$SaleList = ->array("");

I want to load a php file from the server directory, get the HTML contents of this file and place it into a useable array.

It would look like

$SaleList = -getAndCreateArray from the file above >array("");
$SaleList = ->array("john_23, john_5, john_23");

Answer 1

Here is a working version of grabber.php:

<?php
function getSaleList($file) {
    $saleList = array();
    $handle = fopen($file, 'r');
    if (!$handle) {
        throw new RuntimeException('Unable to open ' . $file);
    }
    while (($line = fgets($handle)) !== false) {
        $matches = array();
        if (preg_match('/^(.*?)(\s*\<br\s*\/?\>\s*)?$/i', $line, $matches)) {
            $line = $matches[1];
        }
        array_push($saleList, htmlspecialchars($line));
    }
    if (!feof($handle)) {
        throw new RuntimeException('unexpected fgets() fail on file ' . $file);
    }
    fclose($handle);
    return $saleList;
}

$saleList = getSaleList('datafeed.php');

print_r($saleList);
?>

By using a regular expression to find the <br />, the code is able to deal with many variations such as <br>, <BR>, <BR />, <br/>, etc.

The output is:

Array
(
    [0] => john_23
    [1] => john_5
    [2] => john_23
    [3] => john_5
)