Question

Using either javascript or php, how can I get a value from a webpage? This is the JSON I am attempting to parse:

{“error”:[“”],”templateHtml”:””,
“_visitor_conversationsUnread”:”0″,”_visitor_alertsUnread”:”0″}

I am trying to get the value of “_visitor_alertsUnread”.
How would I go about doing this?

Thank you!

Answer 1

You could either parse it using a regex, using json decoding, or simple indexing. However, of these three, json is the most clean and correct way to go.

1) JSON decoding:

$page = file_get_contents($url);
$json_arr = json_decode($string,true);
return $json_arr['_visitor_alertsUnread'];

2) Regular expression:

$page = file_get_contents($url);
$pattern = ".*?_visitor_alertsUnread\\\":\\\"(\\d)\\\"";
preg_match($pattern, $page, $matches);
return $matches[1];

3) Indexing:

$page = file_get_contents($url);
$needle = "_visitor_alertsUnread";
$startpos = strrpos($page, $needle) + strlen($needle) + 3;
$endpos = strrpos($page, "\"", $startpos);
return substr($page, $startpos, $endpos);