Parsing link content whit preg_replace

Hi, iam trying to parse the director name (red part):

<div id="director-info" class="info">
<h5>Director:</h5>
<a href="/name/nm0004716/">[COLOR="Red"]Darren Aronofsky[/COLOR]</a><br/>
</div>

Code (markup):

i tried this, but i cant make it, how should i do it ???

preg_match('/director:<\/h5><a href=\"([^\"]*)\">(.*)<\/a>/i', $file, $matches)

Code (markup):

thanks alot !

 

Hi,

You have to strip \r\n for the input string ($file):

preg_match('/director:\<\/h5\>\<a href=\"([^\"]*)\"\>(.*)?\<\/a\>/i', preg_replace('#(\r?\n)+#','',$file),$matches);

PHP:

Regards

 

thanks koko, i have a problem, i really suck whit regular expressions because i taked some rules from the internet, but i really dont understand well.

The array is returning two values, the first one "/name/nm0004716/" (href content), but not Darren Aronofsky (this is the value that i need), and the second value of the array returns all the web content.

How can i solve it ? and it is any nice tutorial to learn about regular expressions to parse contents ? thanks and sory for my english !

 

Hi, Argento

the returned result is array and its size depends on round brackets you use in your regular expression.
Here is an example:

$file='<div id="director-info" class="info">
<h5>Director:</h5>
<a href="/name/nm0004716/">Darren Aronofsky</a><br/>
</div>';
$matches=array();
preg_match('/director:\<\/h5\>\<a href=\"([^\"]*)\"\>(.*)?\<\/a\>/i', preg_replace('#(\r?\n)+#','',$file),$matches);
print_r($matches);

PHP:

Now, let's remove ...href=\"([^\"]*)... because we don't need the href value, but only innerHTML instead:

Array
(
    [0] => Director:</h5><a href="/name/nm0004716/">Darren Aronofsky</a>
    [1] => Darren Aronofsky
)

PHP:

Hope it's now a little bit clear.
Regards

 

yeah, it works fine in the example, i see that my problem it is whit the entire code, when i convert the url content to an string:

$url = "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1125849/";

function get_imdb($url)
{
   if (!($file = file_get_contents($url)))
      trigger_error('Imposible to return imdb page', E_USER_ERROR);
   if (!preg_match('/director:\<\/h5\>\<a href=\"([^\"]*)\"\>(.*)?\<\/a\>/i', preg_replace('#(\r?\n)+#','',$file),$matches))
      trigger_error('Unable to parse IMDB response', E_USER_ERROR);
   return $matches[1];
}

$resultado = get_imdb($url);
echo $resultado;

Code (markup):

Why it dosent work in this case ?

Thanks koko !

 

You could also do this using DOM and XPath:

$html = file_get_contents('http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1125849/');
$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($html);


$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$hrefs = $xpath->evaluate("/html/body//div[@id='director-info']//a");

for ($i = 0; $i < $hrefs->length; $i++) {
	$href = $hrefs->item($i);
	echo $href->firstChild->data . '<br />';
  echo $href->getAttribute('href');
  }	

PHP:

 

Because incomming data comes escaped and you have to stripslashes:

preg_match('/director:\<\/h5\>\<a href=\"([^\"])*\"\>(.*)?\<\/a\>/i', stripslashes(preg_replace('#(\r?\n)+#','',$file)),$matches)

PHP:

btw as JDevereux wrote, it's better using DOM is this case.

Regards