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)

 H107 - String Handling in PHP
  [4072] Splitting the difference with PHP - (2013-04-27)
  [4071] Setting up strings in PHP - (2013-04-27)
  [3790] Solution looking for a problem? Lookahead and Lookbehind - (2012-06-30)
  [3789] More than just matching with a regular expression in PHP - (2012-06-30)
  [3788] Getting more than a yes / no answer from a regular expression pattern match - (2012-06-30)
  [3534] Learning to program in PHP - Regular Expression and Associative Array examples - (2011-12-01)
  [3516] Regular Expression modifiers in PHP - summary table - (2011-11-12)
  [3515] PHP - moving from ereg to preg for regular expressions - (2011-11-11)
  [3424] Divide 10000 by 17. Do you get 588.235294117647, 588.24 or 588? - Ruby and PHP - (2011-09-08)
  [3020] Handling (expanding) tabs in PHP - (2010-10-29)
  [2629] Curly braces within double quoted strings in PHP - (2010-02-09)
  [2238] Handling nasty characters - Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, Lua - (2009-06-14)
  [2165] Making Regular Expressions easy to read and maintain - (2009-05-10)
  [2046] Finding variations on a surname - (2009-02-17)
  [1799] Regular Expressions in PHP - (2008-09-16)
  [1613] Regular expression for 6 digits OR 25 digits - (2008-04-16)
  [1603] Do not SHOUT and do not whisper - (2008-04-06)
  [1533] Short and sweet and sticky - PHP form input - (2008-02-06)
  [1336] Ignore case in Regular Expression - (2007-09-08)
  [1195] Regular Express Primer - (2007-05-20)
  [1058] PHP Regular expression to extrtact link and text - (2007-01-31)
  [1008] Date conversion - PHP - (2006-12-26)
  [728] Looking ahead and behind in a Regular Expression - (2006-05-22)
  [716] Evaluating arithmetic expressions in configuration files - (2006-05-10)
  [642] How similar are two words - (2006-03-11)
  [608] Don't expose your regular expressions - (2006-02-15)
  [589] Robust PHP user inputs - (2006-02-03)
  [574] PHP - dividing a string up into pieces - (2006-01-23)
  [560] The fencepost problem - (2006-01-10)
  [558] Converting between acres and hectares - (2006-01-08)
  [493] Running a Perl script within a PHP page - (2005-11-12)
  [463] Splitting the difference - (2005-10-13)
  [422] PHP Magic Quotes - (2005-08-22)
  [337] the array returned by preg_match_all - (2005-06-06)
  [54] PHP and natural sorting - (2004-09-19)
  [31] Here documents - (2004-08-28)

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

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