Count columns in a HTML table with php

Question

Hay Guys,

i have a basic string with holds a html table. The table looks like this:

<TR>
    <TD>asdf, dfg</TD><TD>0915</TD><TD>0945</TD><TD></TD><TD>15</TD><TD>45</TD><TD></TD><TD>1315</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
    <TD>asdf, dfg</TD><TD>0915</TD><TD>0945</TD><TD></TD><TD>15</TD><TD>45</TD><TD></TD><TD>1315</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
    <TD>asdf, dfg</TD><TD>0915</TD><TD>0945</TD><TD></TD><TD>15</TD><TD>45</TD><TD></TD><TD>1315</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
    <TD>asdf, dfg</TD><TD>0915</TD><TD>0945</TD><TD></TD><TD>15</TD><TD>45</TD><TD></TD><TD>1315</TD>
</TR>

How would i use PHP to determine how many columns this table has?

Thanks

Answer 1

As others have mentioned, if you have guaranteed valid HTML, and the table is guaranteed to have equal length rows, you can use simple string manipulation. Split the string on <tr>, then count the number of <td> in each piece:

function count_table_columns($html) {
    $html = strtolower($html);
    $rows = split('<tr>', $html);
    foreach($rows as $row) {
        if(!trim($row)) { continue; }
        return substr_count($row, '<td>');
    }
}

If there is the possibility of malformed HTML, use an HTML parser to parse the table, then iterate through the <tr> nodes, and count the subnodes of type <td>.

Here's one HTML parser to consider: http://sourceforge.net/projects/simplehtmldom/

Answer 2

Count <TD>'s with substr_count(). If your string contains more than one row, then count <TR>'s and divide total number of <TD>'s by number of <TR>'s.