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Find the count of particular non alpha numeric character between the html tags by using PHP preg functions

I have a part of HTML string like below which I get from web page scraping.

$scraping_html = "<html><body>
....
<div id='ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_lblHdr'>some text here with &. some text here.</div>
....</body></html>";

I want to take count of & between the particular div by using PHP. Is it possible to get using any of the PHP preg functions? Thanks in advance.

Solution

  • The hard part is getting the text nodes (I assume that's where you're stuck). Depending on how reliable it needs to be you have two alternatives (just sample code, not actually tested):

    • Good old strip_tags():

      $plain_text = strip_tags($scraping_html);

    • Proper DOM parser:

      $dom = new DOMDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$dom->loadHTML($scraping_html);
libxml_use_internal_errors(false);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$plain_text = '';
foreach ($xpath->query('//text()') as $textNode) {
    $plain_text .= $textNode->nodeValue;
}

    To count, you have e.g. substr_count().