extract info from another web page

Question

I have this test.php where i have this info :

callername1 : \'Fernando Verdasco1\'
callername2 : \'Fernando Verdasco2\'
callername3 : \'Fernando Verdasco3\'
call         


        

Answer 1

You should store data in a file with the .php extension, since it's not executable PHP. I looks like you're going for the JSON syntax.

Since you need it to work with ':' I assume, for whatever reason, you can't change the format. Your example with '=' works because of the regexp:

preg_match_all('/callername3=\'([^\']+)\'/',$Text,$Match); 

This says, match text like callername3= followed by a ' followed by one or more chars that are not a ' followed by a final '. Everything between the 's is stored in $Match[1][0] (if there were more parts in brackets they be stored in $Match[2][0], etc).

Your example doesn't work since it doesn't account for the spaces before and after the = sign. But we can fix that up and change it to work for : like this:

preg_match('/callername3\s*:\s*\'([^\']+)\'/',$Text,$Match); 
echo $Match[1] ."\n"; 

This displays:

Fernando Verdasco3

And what that regular expression is match text that start callername3 followed by any amount of whitespace (that's the \s*) followed by a :, followed by any amount of whitespace, followed by a name in quotes (that is stored in $Match[1], this is the area of the regular expression enclosed in parenthesis).

I've also used just preg_match because it looks like you only need to match one example.