How do store a portion of a string as a variable? 2

[farley99]

I want to extract the number between <b> and </b> from this string, in this case 5
<a href=&quot;hello.php&quot; class=&quot;links&quot;><b>5</b><br>Visitors</a>

grep(<a href=&quot;hello.php&quot; class=&quot;links&quot;><b>([0-9]+)</b><br>Visitors</a>);
$number=$1;

What is the correct syntax?

 

[sleipnir214]

No, that syntax is not correct. PHP doesn't have a builtin function grep().

You might try preg_replace() (

http://php.he.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php):

<?php
$a = '<a href=&quot;hello.php&quot; class=&quot;links&quot;><b>5</b><br>Visitors</a>';

$foo = preg_replace ('/.*<a href=&quot;hello.php&quot; class=&quot;links&quot;><b>([0-9]+)<\/b><br>Visitors<\/a>.*/', '$1', $a);

With the preg_*() functions, you must escape the slashes in HTML closing tags (&quot;<\/a>&quot;) in your search pattern.
print $foo;
?>

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[DRJ478]

Alternative solution:

$number = intval(strip_tags($string));

This would work in your case since the digit is the first thing to apear in the stripped version.
There are more possibilities like this, however, the regular expression should be your choice. I'd only recommend to make it more abstract because you lock yourself in specifying the anchor tag with the attributes. If anything changes in there, like the CSS class, you need to adjust the expression.
There would be probably also other ways to get the value. The only question is:
How did it get there?