Php String query

[mehstg]

Wondering if there is anyone on here who programs in PHP.

Basically, I have a PHP script that takes an input in from an XML stream. It then parses the XML file to variables.

The problem I am having, is, the <description> tag in the XML contains a load of extra data, surplus to my needs. I was wondering if anyone knew of a way in PHP to search for a character and remove everything after, and including the character. The surplus data always starts with "<"

Cheers

Paul

 

[ben]

Will that substring only appear once? (so ALWAYS the first occurence of it is the place to chop)

 

[mehstg]

Will that substring only appear once? (so ALWAYS the first occurence of it is the place to chop)

Yup. Basically, it is the first < of the formatting. I just need the plain text preceding the formatting.

 

[ben]

Ok there is no error checking in this, so that character will always need to be there.

$variable is the incoming var.

$variable = substr($variable, 0, strpos($variable, "<")-1);

If there might be an occasion where that lt string WON'T be in the string, then use:

if (strpos($variable, "<"))
{
$variable = substr($variable, 0, strpos($variable, "<")-1);
}

OR you could use a regex, but it's kinda overkill for this

 

[mehstg]

That's brilliant Ben, cheers. Really need to brush up on my PHP. Has been so long since I programmed it, it's like starting from scratch!