Eliminating HTML element

ben777 · #1 (**permalink**) 04-17-09, 02:19 PM

Hello guys,

I'm developing a back-end system which need to take output (an html page with table) from another website using cURL function. The problem is, i don't need all HTML element from that page. I just want to take some. Here is example of the HTML page :

Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>

<body>

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla et justo. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Etiam fermentum, erat id.</p>

<br />

<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
  <tr>
    <th scope="col">Header 1 </th>
    <th scope="col">Header 2 </th>
    <th scope="col">Header 3 </th>
    <th scope="col">Header 4 </th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Data 1.1 </td>
    <td>Data 2.1</td>
    <td>Data 3.1</td>
    <td>Data 4.1</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Data 1.2</td>
    <td>Data 2.2</td>
    <td>Data 3.2</td>
    <td>Data 4.2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Data 1.3</td>
    <td>Data 2.3</td>
    <td>Data 3.3</td>
    <td>Data 4.3</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Data 1.4</td>
    <td>Data 2.4</td>
    <td>Data 3.4</td>
    <td>Data 4.4</td>
  </tr>
</table>

<br />

<br />

<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
  <tr>
    <th scope="col">Header 1 </th>
    <th scope="col">Header 2 </th>
    <th scope="col">Header 3 </th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Data 1.1 </td>
    <td>Data 2.1</td>
    <td>Data 3.1</td>
    <td>Data 4.1</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Data 1.2</td>
    <td>Data 2.2</td>
    <td>Data 3.2</td>
    <td>Data 4.2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Data 1.3</td>
    <td>Data 2.3</td>
    <td>Data 3.3</td>
    <td>Data 4.3</td>
  </tr>
</table>

</body>
</html>

Simple plain HTML... All i want to do is eliminating all except the second table. I tried using str_replace function but there are too many element to eliminate. Is there any suggestion for me ?? Thanks in advance...

ben

de.monkeyz · #2 (**permalink**) 04-17-09, 02:47 PM

This might work on the string.

PHP Code:


			
$matched = array();
preg_match_all('/<table.*?<\/table>/si', $html, $matched);

print_r($matched);

Check which key in the array is the table you want.

dgreenhouse · #3 (**permalink**) 04-17-09, 08:02 PM

The page you posted if valid XHTML so yo could use the DOM functions.
http://www.php.net/book.dom

If any page you want to parse is not valid xml, you'll have to revert to string manipulations.