extracting text from HTML

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Grabbing the href attribute of an A element

I'm trying to extract some folders names from HTML page, The source code of the HTML looks like this ..

<li><a href="/"> Parent Directory</a></li>
<li><a href=".ftpquota"> .ftpquota</a></li>
<li><a href="Folder%201/"> Folder 1/</a></li>
<li><a href="Floder%202/"> Folder 2/</a></li>
<li><a href="Folder%20N/"> Folder N/</a></li>

What I created so far, I can extract some folders, but not extracted correctly.

Here is what I've done ..

<?php

    $url = "URL";
    $page_data = file_get_contents($url);
    $search_pattern = "<li><a href=";
    $position = 0;

    while($position = strpos($page_data,$search_pattern, $position+strlen($search_pattern)))
    {
        //$pos2 = strpos($page_data, "\"> ", $position);
        //echo $position . " - " . $pos2 . " = " . ($pos2-$position) . "<br />";
        $str = substr($page_data,$position+strlen($search_pattern)+1, $pos2-$position);
        echo "<pre>" . $position . " || " . $str . "\n</pre>";
    }

?>

Each folder contains some files that I will copy using copy() since I'm using Windows, so I don't have wget.

What I'm doing wrong here??

This is my output:

156 || /"> Parent Directory
.ftpquota

Folder 1/

Folder 2/

Folder N/

But what I really need is:

Folder 1
Folder 2
Folder N

Cause later on, I'll loop through the folders and copy the files.

[simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net](http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/) — Vinay, Sep 06 '12 at 08:57
`print_r (explode(' ', strip_tags($string)))` will give you the array of all data between tags... where `$string` equals the input html. — Vishal, Sep 06 '12 at 09:01

Mihai Iorga · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-06T09:50:39.413

5

Use DOMDocument and DOMXPath for HTML

$string = '<li><a href="/"> Parent Directory</a></li>
<li><a href=".ftpquota"> .ftpquota</a></li>
<li><a href="Folder%201/"> Folder 1/</a></li>
<li><a href="Floder%202/"> Folder 2/</a></li>
<li><a href="Folder%20N/"> Folder N/</a></li>
<li><a href="file.bin"> file.bin</a></li>';

$html = new DOMDocument(); 
$html->loadHTML($string);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($html);
$filtered = $xpath->query("//a/@href");

foreach($filtered as $one){
    if(strlen($one->nodeValue) > 1) {
        echo urldecode($one->nodeValue)."\n";
    }
}

Codepad Example

edited Sep 06 '12 at 09:50

answered Sep 06 '12 at 08:58

Mihai Iorga

39,330
16
106
107

or you can use `$html->getElementsByTagName('a');`, right? – Ties Sep 06 '12 at 09:07
1

Maybe he wants just a part of the page and not all, he can use `DOMXPath` to search easier .. – Mihai Iorga Sep 06 '12 at 09:08
:) yes, I saw `$search_pattern` and didn't read the rest :) – Mihai Iorga Sep 06 '12 at 09:13
This code provided half of what I want, it just gets the folders, I also want the files .. As I said, there are files within the folders that I will retrieve later on. – sikas Sep 06 '12 at 09:43
just for clarification, extensions are not the same .. there are .bin, .pdf, .txt ,.tar .. multiple extensions. – sikas Sep 06 '12 at 09:46
my bad :( ... I'll try to be more precise :) – sikas Sep 06 '12 at 09:53
didn't work .. found this and it worked http://www.php.net/manual/en/domdocument.loadhtmlfile.php#87294 – sikas Sep 06 '12 at 09:53

extracting text from HTML

1 Answers1