Parse value from HTML snippet using PHP

Question

I have the following html :

<span class="orig_line">
<a class="original" href="http://nucleify.org/">Nucleify <i class="externalLink icon-circle-arrow-right"></i></a>
&middot;

by <span class="author">Random Person</span>
&middot;
October 1, 2013
</span>

I am using Simple HTML DOM parser class which is available on sourceforge, here is sample code i am using:

$newoutput = str_get_html($htmlCode);
$html  = new simple_html_dom();
$html->load($newoutput);
foreach($html->find('div#titlebar') as $date){
$n['date'] = $date->find('span.orig_line',0)->plaintext);
print $n['date'];
}

As i just want the October 1, 2013 date text from the span (.orig_line) stripping out any further html tags inside it, and just only the text, i cannot find a way around it...

PS: I want to stick to SimpleHTMLDom class only, and no phpQuery or DOMParsers.

Thank you.

Dejan Marjanović · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-16 20:57:23Z

2

Since "simple_html_dom" is heavily regexp based, you can use regexp to match date in plaintext like so:

require 'simple_html_dom.php';

$htmlCode = '
<div id="titlebar">
<span class="orig_line">
<a class="original" href="http://nucleify.org/">Nucleify <i class="externalLink icon-circle-arrow-right"></i></a>
&middot;

by <span class="author">Random Person</span>
&middot;
October 1, 2013
</span>
</div>';

$html  = new simple_html_dom();
$html->load($htmlCode);

foreach ($html->find('div#titlebar') as $date)
{
  $n = [];
  $plaintext = $date->find('span.orig_line', 0)->plaintext;
  preg_match('#[A-Z][a-z]+ \d{1,2}, \d{4}#is', $plaintext, $matches);
  $n['date'] = $matches[0];
  var_dump($n); # array (size=1) 'date' => string 'October 1, 2013' (length=15)
}

answered Oct 16, 2013 at 20:57

Dejan Marjanović

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1 Comment

Ahsan Over a year ago

Ok that seems good, will this be much better to use? so to eliminate any other text that might come : {code} (?:Jan(?:uary)?|Feb(?:ruary)?|Mar(?:ch)?|Apr(?:il)?|May|Jun(?:e)?|Jul(?:y)?|Aug(?:ust)?|Sep(?:tember)?|Sept|Oct(?:ober)?|Nov(?:ember)?|Dec(?:ember)?)+ \d{1,2}, \d{4} {/code}

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