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Question

How to write a preg_match_all just for grabbing one specific element ?

Answer 1

+1 A:

this regex '#<div style="float: right; margin: 10px;">(.*)</div>#' should do the trick (yeah) but i would advice you to use DOM & XPath.

edit:

Here is an Xpath / DOM Example:

$html = <<<HTML
<html>
<body>
    <em>nonsense</em>
    <div style="float: right; margin: 10px;"> here what i want to display on my website </div>
    <div> even more nonsense </div>
</body>
</html>

HTML;

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXpath($doc);
$elements = $xpath->query('//div[@style="float: right; margin: 10px;"]');
echo $elements->item(0)->nodeValue;

Hannes 2010-09-30 15:23:25

Thanks you ;) 5char

Tristan 2010-09-30 15:32:41

var_dump($posts) gives : array(0) { } so it's not working. Why ? how to fix that please ?

Tristan 2010-09-30 15:37:53

Answer 2

+1 A:

If you want something more generic

  preg_match('/<div[^>]+?>(.*?)<\/div>/', $myhtml, $result);
  echo $result[1] . "\n";

$myhtml contains the code html you have to analyze. $result is the array that contains the regexp and () content after the regular expression was applied. $result[1] will give you what is between the <div ... > and </div>.

This way, even if the <div differs (class name change or different attributes), it'll still work.

ring0 2010-09-30 15:37:41

Answer 3

+3 A:

The DOM way to do it would be

libxml_use_internal_errors(TRUE);
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTMLFile('http://www.esl.eu/fr/player/5178309/');
libxml_clear_errors();

$xPath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$nodes = $xPath->query('//div[@style="float: right; margin: 10px;"]');
foreach($nodes as $node) {
    echo $node->nodeValue, PHP_EOL;
}

but there is a whole slew of JavaScript in the page that modifies the DOM heavily after the page was loaded. Since any PHP script based fetching will not execute any JavaScript, the style we search for in the XPath does not exist yet and we won't get any results (the Regex suggesed by Hannes doesn't work for the same reason). Neither do the level numbers on the badge exist yet.

As Wrikken pointed out in the comments, there also seems to be some mechanism to block certain requests. I had the message once, but I am not sure what triggers it, because I could also fetch page on several occasions.

To cut a long story short: you cannot achieve what you are trying to do with this page.

Gordon 2010-09-30 15:42:29

ok, so i'm only going to retrieve other information like forename / lastname and not the images. i'm going to adapt your solution. Thanks

Tristan 2010-09-30 15:48:11

Gordon 2010-09-30 15:52:48

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How to write a preg_match_all just for grabbing one specific element ?

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