I've been working on RSS feeds ... looking to get a page that combines various blogs so that I can have a quick look and see where we stand without having to hop and skip round each in turn. And with magpierss, it's turned out to be quite easy.

Yet some blogs give a summary in the their RSS feeds - a taster, if you like, which is exactly what I want and others spew out the full text, including tags too. How to eliminate the tags, and shorten the text? Well remember that in PHP, there's function to do it

$st = strip_tags($wehave[atom_content]);
$st = preg_replace('/(.{190,}?)\s.*/s','\1 ...',$st);

Can you work out my regular expression? It's returning just the first 190 characters of the incoming string ... or a few more up to the following space if it had to gieva good word bread ... followed by 3 dots. But if the incoming string is not as long as 190 characters, it's returned in its entirety.

You can see my work (so far) at http://www.wellho.net/web2/index.html
(written 2007-09-30)

 Q803 - Object Orientation and General technical topics - Regular Expressions - Extra Elements
  [943] Matching within multiline strings, and ignoring case in regular expressions - (2006-11-25)
  [1336] Ignore case in Regular Expression - (2007-09-08)
  [1601] Replacing the last comma with an and - (2008-04-04)
  [1613] Regular expression for 6 digits OR 25 digits - (2008-04-16)
  [1735] Finding words and work boundaries (MySQL, Perl, PHP) - (2008-08-03)
  [1860] Seven new intermediate Perl examples - (2008-10-30)
  [2909] Be gentle rather than macho ... regular expression techniques - (2010-08-08)
  [3089] Python regular expressions - repeating, splitting, lookahead and lookbehind - (2010-12-17)
  [3100] Looking ahead and behind in Regular Expressions - double matching - (2010-12-23)
  [3516] Regular Expression modifiers in PHP - summary table - (2011-11-12)
  [3650] Possessive Regular Expression Matching - Perl, Objective C and some other languages - (2012-03-12)

H107 - String Handling in PHP
  [31] Here documents - (2004-08-28)
  [54] PHP and natural sorting - (2004-09-19)
  [337] the array returned by preg_match_all - (2005-06-06)
  [422] PHP Magic Quotes - (2005-08-22)
  [463] Splitting the difference - (2005-10-13)
  [493] Running a Perl script within a PHP page - (2005-11-12)
  [558] Converting between acres and hectares - (2006-01-08)
  [560] The fencepost problem - (2006-01-10)
  [574] PHP - dividing a string up into pieces - (2006-01-23)
  [589] Robust PHP user inputs - (2006-02-03)
  [608] Don't expose your regular expressions - (2006-02-15)
  [642] How similar are two words - (2006-03-11)
  [716] Evaluating arithmetic expressions in configuration files - (2006-05-10)
  [728] Looking ahead and behind in a Regular Expression - (2006-05-22)
  [1008] Date conversion - PHP - (2006-12-26)
  [1058] PHP Regular expression to extrtact link and text - (2007-01-31)
  [1195] Regular Express Primer - (2007-05-20)
  [1533] Short and sweet and sticky - PHP form input - (2008-02-06)
  [1603] Do not SHOUT and do not whisper - (2008-04-06)
  [1799] Regular Expressions in PHP - (2008-09-16)
  [2046] Finding variations on a surname - (2009-02-17)
  [2165] Making Regular Expressions easy to read and maintain - (2009-05-10)
  [2238] Handling nasty characters - Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, Lua - (2009-06-14)
  [2629] Curly braces within double quoted strings in PHP - (2010-02-09)
  [3020] Handling (expanding) tabs in PHP - (2010-10-29)
  [3424] Divide 10000 by 17. Do you get 588.235294117647, 588.24 or 588? - Ruby and PHP - (2011-09-08)
  [3515] PHP - moving from ereg to preg for regular expressions - (2011-11-11)
  [3534] Learning to program in PHP - Regular Expression and Associative Array examples - (2011-12-01)
  [3788] Getting more than a yes / no answer from a regular expression pattern match - (2012-06-30)
  [3789] More than just matching with a regular expression in PHP - (2012-06-30)
  [3790] Solution looking for a problem? Lookahead and Lookbehind - (2012-06-30)
  [4071] Setting up strings in PHP - (2013-04-27)
  [4072] Splitting the difference with PHP - (2013-04-27)

Back to Hotel in Melksham at Christmas

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to New Month, New Quarter, New Laws

Choosing between mod_proxy and mod_rewrite
Python v Ruby
Maidenhead Coffee Challenge
New Month, New Quarter, New Laws
A taster PHP expression ...
Hotel in Melksham at Christmas
Apache Tomcat Performance Tuning
One business, four different angles!
Getting the local voice heard
korn tips - some useful korn shell techniques