Re: html stripping

<php-general@mccullough-net.com> wrote in message news:1070551538.3fcf51f221afd@webmail.mccullough-net.com... > No this is not some shaddy game or strip poker knock-off. My question has to > do with a person project I have started. I have a script that grabs names and > ids from a database, puts them in an array and then based on that grabs a URL > and parses that URL for this name, drops all the html crap, and takes the > information/stats and insert or updates the stats table. Problem is on > certain names the page that it is parsing is different, and so I get loads and > loads of extra HTML, and one name in particular doesnt return all the stats. In essence what you're trying to do is spider / trawl web pages that do not have consistent HTML formatting with inflexible functions like substr( ) and str_replace( ) that are incapable of adapting to inconsistent search text. You'd be much better off extracting the relevant data from HTML using functions such as preg_match( ) and preg_replace( ) which let you search over text using Perl-style regular expressions (aka regexes). Function documentation can be found at: http://au3.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php and http://au3.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php If you have no idea what a regex is, think of it as powerful, wildcard-based searching. It allows you to write search expressions that are very tolerant of changing search text and can still extract the data you need. Regexes can be confusing when you start out. Try looking at this tutorial for some starters: http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/52/0.php Good luck. Al