Parsing HTML files in PHP

Hello all. I have used the search function and was unable to find anything that had a clear answer, so sorry if I overlooked something.

I am looking to get all the HTML tags into an array, or something similar. I need to be able to access their tag name (such as <a>, <table>, etc.) their attributes (href, etc.) and their containing text. This is all server-side on a PHP script.

I have seen use of preg_match, but I cannot figure out that command and the documentation skips over it's meaning from what I've seen. I would use XML but it seems that xml_parse skips tags that don't close themselves (such as <LINK> like most pages use to get style-sheets etc.)

Cheers for any examples

Do a search on "regular expressions" here and elsewhere. There has been a discussion recently on how to use preg_match to get tags. Preg_match() is basically an interface to the POSIX (I think) regular expression engine, which is what perl uses. Basically, you pass specially-formatted patterns and the text to search in to a function, which returns true on a match. You can use callbacks to process an array of matches. More than a tutorial on PHP functions, you'll need to find a tutorial on regular expressions; try some perl sites for starters.

Thanks.