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up vote 0 down vote favorite

I'm still very much learning Regex and I suck at it :(

I am getting an external webpage, saving it to a local file. The page contains a form, now I need to find all the form's input's names and put it into an array, for example:

<input type="text" name="firstName">

or

<input type="text" name="firstName" class="something">

from the above I just need firstName to go into my array.

To complicate matters just a little bit, I have noticed people writing it a bit different sometimes because of the space character, like so:

name= "firstName"
name = "firstName"
name ="firstName"

As I am still learning, I would really appreciate it if you could explain your regex

share|improve this question
    
try \bname\b\s*=\s*"\K[^"]+(?=") –  Avinash Raj 39 mins ago
5  
Do̴n͟'̡t p͞ar͜se ͟H̀T̶ML̶ ̸w͟ít͏h ͡r̡e͜g͘ex͟.͢. Use a HTML parser instead. For a relatively small amount of HTML it's ok, but not for what you want to achieve. –  Andrei P. 39 mins ago
    
or use the DOMdocument::getElementsByTagName method and iterate through, grabbing the name property. –  S O 36 mins ago
    
Thanks Avinash, will have a look. Andrei, will look into HTML parsers, got a recommendation? S O, isn't that Javascript? –  Ryan 35 mins ago
1  
@Ryan PHP already has HTML parsers built-in with it. Take a look at DOMDocument of PHP –  Ghost 27 mins ago

2 Answers 2

up vote 0 down vote

You can use something like

$xmldoc = new DOMDocument();
$xmldoc->load('REQUIRED_URL');
foreach ($xmldoc->getElementsByTagName('form') as $formitem) {
    $inputnodes = $formitem->getElementsByTagName('input');
    $name = $inputnodes->item(0)->getAttribute('name');
    echo $name;
}
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up vote 0 down vote

Quick example:

<?PHP

$myDocument = new DOMDocument;
$myDocument->loadHTMLfile('example_page.html');

// Get form item(s)
$formItems = $myDocument->getElementsByTagName('form');

// Get input items from first form item
$inputItems = $formItems->items(0)->getElementsByTagName('input');

// Name attributes
foreach ($inputItems as $inputName) {
     echo $inputName->getAttribute('name') . "<br />";
}

?>
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