Re: getting content exceprts from the database

Ashley Sheridan wrote: > Here's the rub though. As the content is in HTML form, I can't just > grab the first 100 characters and display them as that could leave an > open tag without a closing one, potentially breaking the page. I > could use strip_tags on the 100-character excerpt, but what if the > excerpt itself broke a tag in half (i.e. <acronym title="something"> > could become <acron ) > > The only solutions I can see are: > > > * retrieve the entire article, perform a strip_tags and then > take the excerpt > * use a regex inside of mysql to pull out only the text > - parse the HTML and extract the text elements. If the HTML is well-formed, this is relatively easily done with XSL, if not, you might need to use Beautiful Soup or similar. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (16.1°C)