Question

I’m new to Regular Expressions and things like that. I have only few knowledge and I think my current problem is about them.

I have a webpage, that contains text. I want to get links from the webpage that are only in SPANs that have class='img'.

I go through those steps.

1. grab all the SPANs tagged with the ‘img’ class (this is the hard step that I’m looking for)
2. move those SPANs to a new variable
3. Parse the variable to get an array with the links (Each SPAN has only 1 link, so this will be easy)

I’m using PHP, but any other language doesn’t matter, I’m looking how to deal with the first step. Any one have a suggestion? Thanks 😀

Answer 1

Use PHPs DOMDocument-class in combination with the DOMXPath-class to navigate to the elements you need, like this:

<?php $dom = new DOMDocument(); $dom->loadHTML(file_get_contents('http://foo.bar')); $xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);

$elements = $xpath->query('/html/body//span[@class='img']//a'); foreach ($elements as $a) { echo $a->getAttribute('href'), '\n'; }

You can learn more about the XPath Language on the W3C page.