Formatting PHP outputted plain text into HTML mark-up

Question

We have a client who wants to output cinema listings on their website. This particular cinema has provided us with a link to retrieve the information from. This link is simply outputted in plain text, with the elements seperated by ~|~

I have set up a curl script to grab this plain text from the url and display it as plain text on the clients website. However I now need a way of pulling this information into div classes so I can style it with CSS. Also there are a few links which I need to format into buttons that link to book the show.

This is my current code:

<?php

function curl_get_file_contents($URL)
    {
        $c = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
        $uf_contents = curl_exec($c);
        curl_close($c);

        $contents = str_replace("~|~"," ",$uf_contents);

        if ($contents) return $contents;
            else return FALSE;
    }

echo "<ul>";
echo curl_get_file_contents("THE URL");
echo "</ul>"

?>

All this is doing currently is replacing the separators with a space. I'm really confused on this one and I'm not 100% proficient with PHP. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

What is wrong with looping through the contents you got from curl and adding the tags? — Anigel
– Anigel, Commented Jul 22, 2013 at 10:46

slash197 · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-22 10:48:56Z

4

Try this

foreach (explode("~|~", file_get_contents("URL")) as $item)
{
    echo '<div>' . $item . '</div>';
}

answered Jul 22, 2013 at 10:48

slash197

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Comments

Zelig880 · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-22 11:09:52Z

As you said in your description, your function is just replacing the character with a space.

What you need is split the file and separate in different arrays depending from the format.

to make an array you use the function explode

    //this will split the content in an array
    $theArray = explode("~|~"," ",$uf_contents);

    //here you can assign a different class depending from the value (this just if you
    can distinguish between the various variable quite easily.. For example
    a website because of the .com a rating because of the number). Below there are
    example of website, rating.

    foreach($theArray as $item){
        if(strpos($item,'.com') === true){
            echo "<div class='webSite'>" . $item . "</div>";
        }elseif($item >=0 && $item <= 100){
            echo "<div class='webSite'>" . $item . "</div>";
        }else{
            echo "<div class='normalDiv'>" . $item . "</div>";
        }}

I have given you an example, but I dont know what the file includes and I cant give you a good validation method... If it is a nice table, than you can format it quite esily using the index number..

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