NYCPHP Meetup

[Christopher Greeley]

I have been experimenting with parsing, as I am, and have always been
(regardless of the programming language) in the dark on exactly how I should
be going about parsing a text file. I have always kept it simple with easy
explodes and the like, but it is getting to the point where I want to have a
smarter script that doesn't need a finite list of things that must come in a
certain order, etc. So, to that end, I have been experimenting with parsing
some RSS streams (I am using the Reuters Sports Stream at
http://www.microsite.reuters.com/rss/sportsNews as a guinea pig). I thought
that for this end, sscanf would be really easy - I basically got the
position of two tags I wanted to read in between with strpos, used substr to
truncate the string, and then attempted to use sscanf to parse it into neat
little variables. The problem I ran into is that sscanf doesn't really like
white spaces, and it stops reading at that point. So, I dug around a little
and found that someone had used %[^[]] to match everything - but at this
point, sscanf stopped following my handy little outline.

 

So, this is more of a request for some general direction in gaining some
parsing skills - I am sure there are some out there with some weaker skills
who could use the brush up as well. 

 

Thanks,

Chris

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