CODEWITHSUNDEEP
php
user253938
user253938

Reputation: 172

Getting a substring of varying length in php

So after a bit of stringy business, I was able to get a large chunk of substring from a haystack of string closer to my target after searching the first occurrence of "getflashmedia"

var_dump($str) = 
    string(1735) "getflashmedia" src="http://www.exampleURL.com/media-name.mp4"></object>
    .../*a haystack of code as string*/"

I want to get the URL inside src but this is varying in length, so I can't really use the substr() function

Upvotes: 1

Views: 54

Answers (2)

David Findlay
David Findlay

Reputation: 1356

I would strongly recommend rather than using string functions or regular expressions to parse XML/HTML, you should use XML parsers. You can build a much more reliable scraper this way.

XML parsers can handle situations you may not think of when writing your string handling code.

See XML Parser: http://php.net/manual/en/book.xml.php

Another option is SimpleXML: http://php.net/manual/en/simplexml.examples-basic.php

There are a number of libraries suitable for it.

Upvotes: 2

Daniel
Daniel

Reputation: 1253

Use a regular expression, I'd recommend the following: src="(.*?)".

This expression matches src=" literally, then starts capturing and stops when it finds another ".

<?php

$input = 'getflashmedia" src="http://www.exampleURL.com/media-name.mp4"></object>';

preg_match_all('/src="(.*?)"/', $input, $matches);

print_r($matches[1]);

Output:

Array
(
    [0] => http://www.exampleURL.com/media-name.mp4
)

This will get every link, from every src attribute in the input string. If you only need the first, use preg_match().

Upvotes: 3

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