Any way to pull out a string between two tags?

I have parsed some RSS feeds into a database. Yes I'm using carp evolution, no i cant just aggregate them.

One of the feeds is formatted annoyingly wrong, so when I print out the description from the DB it has all this junk on it :

Author: Craig
Subject: Mirafone S-186 value?
Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2005 5:58 pm (GMT -5)
Topic Replies: 0
<span class="postbody">WHAT I WANT IS HERE</span>

What I want is to show is the text between the SPAN tags. Are there any php functions i can apply to only get the contents of those span tags?

I've looked at ereg_replace and preg_replace and strip tags and all sorts of php tricks, no dice. Thanks in advance for a hint!
-R

 

use the preg_match function, details are here: http://in2.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php

 

if you are not up to regular expressions, this might be simpler.

$start = strpos('<span class="postbody">', $thestring);
$start = $start + 23;
$end = strpos("</span>", $thestring);

$thebitiwant = substr($thestring, $start, $end - $start);

 

Preg match is your best choice, although I believe it's a little bit slower than draculus' example.