I dont know what to research or where to start here.
What im trying to do is use PHP to read an HTML Page and pull out the raw text contained inside a div
the div is this
<div class="thingy">
test
</div>
When the php is executed, I want it to echo
Test
Is there an easy snippet for this, or can someone post a small script?
Edit: the html page with the Div is on another webpage.
If you want to parse your html you can use it like
<?php
$str = '<div class="thingy">test</div>';
echo strip_tags($str);//OUTPUT : test
?>
As your html is on other webpage, start output buffering include that file in your main php script, do all manipulation on it to get the content.
While this could possibly be done using regex, I would recommend using a DOM parser. My reccommendation goes to SimpleHTML Dom Parser. Using it, here's how you would do what you want
$string = "<div class=\"thingy\">test</div>";
$html = str_get_html($string); // create the DOM object
$div = $html->find('div[class=thingy]', 0); // find the first div with a class of 'thingy'
echo $div->plaintext(); // echo the text contents
What you're looking to do is parse HTML. Use the DOM module that comes with PHP to do this: http://php.net/manual/en/book.dom.php
You do NOT want to try to do this with regular expressions.
If you want to remove ALL the HTML tags from a document, use the PHP strip_tags() function: http://us3.php.net/strip_tags