How to find a particular value from a string, PHP

Question

I have a string (not xml )

<headername>X-Mailer-Recptid</headername>
<headervalue>15772348</headervalue>
</header>

from this, i need to get the value 15772348, that is the value of headervalue. How is possible?

Answer 1

Use PHP DOM and traverse the headervalue tag using getElementsByTagName():

<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument;
@$doc->loadHTML('<headername>X-Mailer-Recptid</headername><headervalue>15772348</headervalue></header>');

$items = $doc->getElementsByTagName('headervalue');

for ($i = 0; $i < $items->length; $i++) {
    echo $items->item($i)->nodeValue . "\n";
}
?>

This gives the following output:

15772348

[EDIT]: Code updated to suppress non-HTML warning about invalid headername and headervalue tags as they are not really HTML tags. Also, if you try to load it as XML, it totally fails to load.

Answer 2

This looks XML-like to me. Anyway, if you don't want to parse the string as XML (which might be a good idea), you could try something like this:

<?
$str = "<headervalue>15772348</headervalue>";
preg_match("/<headervalue\>([0-9]+)<\/headervalue>/", $str, $matches);
print_r($matches);
?>