Question

In a remote site, there is a HTML file (say http://www.example.com/abc.html), which reads:

<input id="ID1" name="NAME1" value="VALUE1">

In my PHP code in my server, I need “VALUE1” from http://www.example.com/abc.html. How can I do it using PHP?

Since the remote html is written in XHTML 1.0, I guess I could use an XML parser?

---

ADDED

Using xml_parse_into_struct, I obtained an array that contains:

[15] => Array
    (
        [tag] => INPUT
        [type] => complete
        [level] => 4
        [attributes] => Array
            (
                [TYPE] => hidden
                [NAME] => NAME1
                [ID] => ID1
                [VALUE] => VALUE1
            )

    )

How can I obtain “VALUE1”? I guess now this is more a question for handling arrays in PHP. I always know the name “NAME1”, but I don’t know the value “VALUE1”. So I want to obtain “VALUE1” using “NAME1” which is the information I know.

Answer 1

Why not just using a simple regex?

$html = '<input id="ID1" name="NAME1" value="VALUE1">';

if (preg_match('/name="NAME1".+value="(.*?)"/i', $html, $matches)) {
   echo $matches[1];  // should echo VALUE1;
}

The only constraint is that name must appear before value in the HTML element.