Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, 2nd Edition

Using LIB_parse

One thing you may notice about LIB_parse is a lack of regular expressions, even though regular expressions are a mainstay for parsing text. Regular expressions can be difficult to read and understand, especially for beginners. The built-in PHP string-manipulation functions are easier to understand than regular expressions. That doesn’t mean we won’t discuss regular expressions. Chapter 5 talks about regular expressions and their utility in webbot development.

What follows is a description of the functions in LIB_parse and the parsing problems they solve. These functions are also described completely within the comments of LIB_parse.

Splitting a String at a Delimiter: split_string()

The simplest parsing function returns a string that ...