Re: Extract printable text from web page using preg_match

On 27-Feb-07, at 1:44 PM, Richard Lynch wrote:

On Tue, February 27, 2007 11:47 am, M5 wrote:

I am trying to write a regex function to extract the readable (visible, screen-rendered) portion of any web page. Specifically, I only want the text between the <body> tags, excluding any <script> or <style> tags within the document, also excluding comments. Has anyone here seen such a regex? Is it possible to do in one expression?

I think http://php.net/striptags may be your best bet...

No, it's not a very good solution. Striptags will leave everything within <head>, <style> and <script> (in the body or out). Comments are also included. I know it's possible to use non reg-ex strpos/substr to extra everything within <body>, but as another poster correctly said, this assumes a consistent HTML document (which there is not). I realize now that such a regex would be rather sophisticated, but I thought surely it must exist, since text-scrapping the readable content of a web page must not be rare.

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