String Manipulation Help

[Ik]

Please see the code below.

<ul>
	<li>
		Services
		<ul>
			<li>
				Web Design & Development
				<ul>
					<li>CMS</li>
					<li>e-Commerce</li>
				</ul>
			</li>
			<li>SEO</li>
			<li>Hosting</li>
		</ul>
		<li>About</li>
		<li>Contact</li>
	</li>
</ul>

I have it in a string variable, and I want to be able to get the 3rd level UL from it. So here is what I want to get:

<ul>
<li>CMS</li>
<li>e-Commerce</li>
</ul>

Your help is appreciated. I'm using PHP 5

 

[Kate]

I would have a look at the PHP DOM parser to traverse the HTML structure, other XML libraries should do the job as well.

 

[qbert220]

Or you could use preg_match like this (untested):

if (preg_match('#^.*?<ul>.*?<ul>.*?(<ul>.*?</ul>)#i', $matches))
{
    echo $matches[1];
}

 

[Ik]

Or you could use preg_match like this (untested):

if (preg_match('#^.*?<ul>.*?<ul>.*?(<ul>.*?</ul>)#i', $matches))
{
    echo $matches[1];
}

It seems to me that preg_match is the solution, but the code above is not working anf I'm not too good with regular expressions.

 

[RageD]

Well, what exactly are you looking for?

The best thing to do is to find a single regex that searches for all that you're looking for. Else, you can use a for(); loop or similar to go through multiple regex queries, but preg_match(); will show greater signs of slow downs than str_match();

-RageD

 

[qbert220]

Tested working code:

<?php

$string = '<ul>
        <li>
                Services
                <ul>
                        <li>
                                Web Design & Development
                                <ul>
                                        <li>CMS</li>
                                        <li>e-Commerce</li>
                                </ul>
                        </li>
                        <li>SEO</li>
                        <li>Hosting</li>
                </ul>
                <li>About</li>
                <li>Contact</li>
        </li>
</ul>
';

if (preg_match('#^.*?<ul>.*?<ul>.*?(\s*<ul>.*?</ul>)#is', $string, $matches))
{
    echo $matches[1]."\n";
}

?>

This should display:

                                <ul>
                                        <li>CMS</li>
                                        <li>e-Commerce</li>
                                </ul>

In the preg_match:

"^" means match the start of the string
"." means match any character
"*" means zero or more of the previous element
"?" means non-greedy (matches as little as possible - be default the regexp will match as many characters as possible)
"\s" means match whitespace characters

The "i" modifier means cases insensitive
The "s" modifier enables multi-line matching

So ".*" means match zero or more of any character. Adding the "?" means match as few characters as possible. I added the "\s*" to also capture the indenting before the last <td>.

 

[Ik]

That is perfect. Thanks a lot for the explanation as well

Tested working code:

...snip...