PHP - Getting values inside PHP tags

Question

I have a HTML page that includes the code

<li><span class="li-time">00:30</span>
<span class="li-title">Headline News</span></li>
<li><span class="li-time">00:31</span>
<span class="li-title">Money Mind</span></li>
<li><span class="li-time">01:00</span>
<span class="li-title">Headline News</span></li>
<li><span class="li-time">01:01</span>
<span class="li-title">Singapore Tonight</span></li>

and does not have a definite number of how many values there are. What I want to do is to format the result so that it displays all of the time/title in the format

00:30 Headline News
00:31 Money Mind
01:00 Headline News

It would be best if I didn't have to use an external parser. Sorta new to php, hope you guys can advise me :)

So you have a bunch of times, and a bunch of names, and they are associated with each other on a 1-to-1 basis? This data should be expressed as a table. — Quentin
– Quentin, Commented Feb 7, 2011 at 7:35
Why do you want to use PHP to transform HTML? Use CSS to style the page into the presentation you want. — Konerak
– Konerak, Commented Feb 7, 2011 at 7:36
I'm not really sure what the question is though. Is that HTML the input or the output? Where does PHP come into it? Do you want to parse the HTML with PHP, and then output a plain text file with the data? — Quentin
– Quentin, Commented Feb 7, 2011 at 7:36
That's HTML, not php. I would suggest finding a good online tutorial on starting php — Toby Allen
– Toby Allen, Commented Feb 7, 2011 at 7:36

Gary · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-07 08:30:39Z

3

Thanks for all the suggestions guys, managed to solve my problem using DOM

<?php


$data = file_get_contents("html");


$pattern = '/<ul id="schedule">.*<\/ul>/';
preg_match($pattern, $data, $matches); // to obtain sample code (<li><span...>)


function getTextBetweenTags($string, $tagname){
    $d = new DOMDocument();
    $d->loadHTML($string);
    $return = array();
    foreach($d->getElementsByTagName($tagname) as $item){
        $return[] = $item->textContent;
    }
    return $return;
}

$count = 0;
$txt = getTextBetweenTags($matches[0], "span");
foreach ($txt as $val){
$count++;
echo $val;
echo "\t";
if (($count % 2) == 0){
    print "<br>";
}
}

?>

edited Feb 7, 2011 at 8:30

answered Feb 7, 2011 at 8:22

Gary

1291 silver badge11 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Comments

Jakob Egger · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-07 08:22:11Z

0

In this simple case, just call $text = strip_tags($html). Then $text looks like this:

00:30
Headline News
00:31
Money Mind
01:00
Headline News

Now do something like this to replace every other newline with a space:

$lines = explode('\n',$text);
$final_text = '';
for ($i=0;$i<count($lines);$i++) {
  $final_text .= $lines[$i];
  if ($i%2==0) {
     $final_text .= ' ';
  } else {
     $final_text .='\n';
  }
}

If the HTML you have is not always precisely the format you have shown, you will have to parse the HTML using SimpleXML or the more complicated DOM functions.

An example using SimpleXML would be the following:

$html = <<<EOF
<html>
<li><span class="li-time">00:30</span>
<span class="li-title">Headline News</span></li>
<li><span class="li-time">00:31</span>
<span class="li-title">Money Mind</span></li>
<li><span class="li-time">01:00</span>
<span class="li-title">Headline News</span></li>
<li><span class="li-time">01:01</span>
<span class="li-title">Singapore Tonight</span></li> 
</html>
EOF;

$sx = simplexml_load_string($html);

$output_text = '';
foreach($sx->li as $list_item) {
    $output_text .= $list_item->span[0] . " " . $list_item->span[1] . "\n";
}

echo $output_text;

Please note that $html must be wrapped with some tag (I chose <html></html> in the example).

edited Feb 7, 2011 at 8:22

answered Feb 7, 2011 at 7:45

Jakob Egger

12.1k4 gold badges42 silver badges48 bronze badges

2 Comments

Gary Over a year ago

I've tried the split_tags function already, but the results actually turn out to be 00:30Headline News00:31Money Mind01:00Headline News instead of new lines

Jakob Egger Over a year ago

Oh... Have you tried adding a space before every newline? Eg. str_replace('\n',' \n',$text)

Harri · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-07 07:39:02Z

0

If you just want to control layout and typography, you have to use CSS, not PHP.

answered Feb 7, 2011 at 7:39

Harri

2,7322 gold badges22 silver badges25 bronze badges

1 Comment

Gary Over a year ago

So I won't be able to format it using php even if I've stored the HTML code in a variable? I'm getting the results(time/title) from another site, so it's not possible to use HTML/CSS for formatting.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

PHP - Getting values inside PHP tags

3 Answers 3

Comments

2 Comments

1 Comment

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

3 Answers 3

Comments

2 Comments

1 Comment

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related