variable from xml

[GO ILLINI]

http://feeds.spreadfirefox.com/downloads/firefox.xml
Could someone please point me to a tutorial/ give me a script to find the value of description? I dont want to learn how to interact fully between xml and php yet just how to get this little thing done.

The one and only,
ILLINI

[lavinpj1]

I did this recently and just used a bit of simple regex...

PHP Code:

<?php
$content =
file_get_contents("http://feeds.spreadfirefox.com/downloads/firefox.xml");

$pattern = '@(<description>).*?(?=</description>)@';
preg_match_all($pattern, $content, $description);

$description = substr($description[0][0], 13);

echo 'The description is ' . $description;
?>

~Phil~

[GO ILLINI]

Well that works great except for one problem... Is is possible to look for the second desctiption? The one with the number in it?
thanks

The one and only,
ILLINI

[lavinpj1]

Yes...

<?php
$content =
file_get_contents("http://feeds.spreadfirefox.com/downloads/firefox.xml");

$pattern = '@(<description>).*?(?=</description>)@';
preg_match_all($pattern, $content, $matches);

$description = substr($matches[0][0], 13);
$description2 = substr($matches[0][1], 13);

echo 'The description is ' . $description . ' and the 2nd description
is ' . $description2;
?>

preg_match_all produces a 2d array. You can do something like...

echo '<pre>'; print_r($matches); echo '</pre>';

Just after the preg_match_all. This will give you an overview of the array created. The way 2,3,4,5 even 8934880203D arrays work, is you have arrays inside arrays inside arrays etc. This is really handy in some cases. You can see in my code, $matches[0][1]. This means item 0 of array 1 and item 1 of array 2. If you had a 5D array, you could do something like $matches[2][5][9][4][7].

Anywhooo, hope this helps

~Phil~

[GO ILLINI]

cool man thanks works like a charm.
thanks


The one and only,
ILLINI

[chump2877]

quick question...in your regex pattern, what is the red part doing exactly:

$pattern = '@(<description>).*?(?=</description>)@';

[lavinpj1]

?= takes it before that point. i.e. If you had <description>hello hello hello</description> and didn't use a ?=, you'd get <description>hello hello hello</description> output. If you do use a ?=, you get <description>hello hello hello output. My regex isn't the best, and if someone would advise me on how to do a similar thing with the initial <description>, rather than having to substr it out, that would be very handy.

~Phil~