Regular expression help needed [Resolved]

[MikkyThomeon]

Hi all

I need to create a regular expression so that I can use the preg_split function to split up a table by its td elements

$rows=preg_split("^(<tr)+(</tr>)$",$table); 

This is the warning i get:

Warning: No ending delimiter '^' found in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\nkgroup\admin\parser.php on line 63

And the table DOES contain rows. I have searched on the net and I cant find an explanation.

If you do have one, I would be reaaalllllly grateful!!!

Thanks in advance

[visualAd]

Perl style regular expressions should be delimeted with solidus'. The following should work:

$rows=preg_split("/^(<tr)+(</tr> )$/",$table); 

[MikkyThomeon]

Hi again

VisualAd, thanks - I tried your tip but it returned the following error:

Warning: Unknown modifier 't' in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\nkgroup\admin\parser.php on line 63

Why is php giving me this error? Again your help would be much appreciated.

Just for helping out, here is a freebie function for you that works quite well:

    function downloadtable($url,$tablesearchkey)
    {
        $start=false;
        $end=false;
        $line="";
        $body="";
        
        $file = fopen ($url, "r");
        if (!$file)
        {
            echo "<p>Unable to open remote file.\n";
            exit;
        }
        while (!feof ($file))
        {
            $line= fgets ($file, 512);
            if($start==false)
            {
                $pos=strpos($line,$tablesearchkey);
                if($pos)
                {
                    $line=substr($line,$pos-1,strlen($line)-$pos);
                     $body.=$line;
                    $start=true;
                }
            }
            else
            {
                if($end==false)
                {
                    $pos=strpos($line,"</table>");
                    if($pos)
                    {
                        $pos+=7;    //ent table marker length
                        $line=substr($line,1,$pos);
                          $body.=$line;
                        $end=true;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        $body.=$line;
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        fclose($file);
        return($body);
    } 

[visualAd]

Sorry, I didn't look at the acutal regular expression. The / character in the expression must be escaped with a "\" otherwise it will think the first one is the end of the expression and cause an error.

$rows=preg_split("/^(<tr)+(<\\/tr> )$/",$table); 

What is it you are doing? If you are trying to extract all the text in between table rows I would recommend you use preg_match_all and not preg_split which splits a string which is dlimetered by a the regular expression.

Thanks for the function by the way. But what exactly does it do

[MikkyThomeon]

The function basically extracts a table from a web page. If you specify the <table...> in the target page, then the complete table will be returned.

I am trying to use this combined with the regular expressions so that I can load the weather data into my own database and do custom data analysis, as well as create a wml fromt end for this information. Whenever I get the chance to surf, I will know which spot is the best to go to and all I have to do is check on my cell to save myself a lot of time and travelling.

Try using the function like this:

$test = downloadtable("http://www.weathersa.co.za/wx/CurrentWx/Current.jsp?synopNo=68593","<table width=\"100%\" border=\"0\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"0\">"); 

Of course, I need to parse the td tags into fields that can be stored in a database. I will try preg_match_all - sounds good...

[MikkyThomeon]

preg_match_all("|<td[^>]+>(.*)</[^>]+>|U",$table,$out,PREG_SET_ORDER); 

After your tip off I looked in the php manual and found the way above which worked. For some reason I can still not get the original method to work.

Thanks for your help!!! Now I can get custom weather reports on my phone!!!

[MikkyThomeon]

here is the code if anybody else would like to do sonething similar...

<?
    //this script takes an existing page on the internet and parses all the
    //tags on the page into. An array. Then another function can be called
    //to takes this array and extract the tables from the array. Each
    //table will then be represented as a new 2d array
    
    function downloadtable($url,$tablesearchkey)
    {
        $start=false;
        $end=false;
        $line="";
        $body="";
        
        $file = fopen ($url, "r");
        if (!$file)
        {
            echo "<p>Unable to open remote file.\n";
            exit;
        }
        while (!feof ($file))
        {
            $line= fgets ($file, 512);
            if($start==false)
            {
                $pos=strpos($line,$tablesearchkey);
                if($pos)
                {
                    $line=substr($line,$pos-1,strlen($line)-$pos);
                     $body.=$line;
                    $start=true;
                }
            }
            else
            {
                if($end==false)
                {
                    $pos=strpos($line,"</table>");
                    if($pos)
                    {
                        $pos+=7;    //ent table marker length
                        $line=substr($line,1,$pos);
                          $body.=$line;
                        $end=true;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        $body.=$line;
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        fclose($file);
        return($body);
    }

    function parsetable($table,$skiprows)
    {
        $rowcount=0;
        $buffer="";
        $cnt=0;
        $ret="";

    // send wml headers
    header("Content-type: text/vnd.wap.wml");
    echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>";
    echo "<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC \"-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN\""
       . " \"http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml\">";
?>
<wml>
<card id="card1" title="WeatherCheck"><p><?
        preg_match_all("|<td[^>]+>(.*)</[^>]+>|U",$table,$out,PREG_SET_ORDER);
        for($i=1;$i<14;$i+=2)
        {
            $ret.= trim($out[$i][1]).trim($out[$i+1][1])."<br/>";    //.$out[$i+1][1]."
        }
        $ret=str_replace("\n","",$ret);
        print $ret;
        print "</p></card></wml>";
    }


    
    $test = downloadtable("http://www.weathersa.co.za/wx/CurrentWx/Current.jsp?synopNo=68593",
                "<table width=\"100%\" border=\"0\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"0\">");

    $replaced=str_replace(array("<b>","</b>","<strong>","\n","&"),"",$test);
    parsetable($replaced,1);
    
?>