PHP for scanning all files in a directory for a custom tag?

[cedarplank]

Hi, I'm a PHP newb trying to write a script that will scan all the HTML files in a local directory, get the contents of a special tag on each page, then output a new HTML page listing 1) each page's URL and 2) the contents of its special tag.

Can anyone point me to a good starting place? Do I need to first scan the directory and build an array of file names to open and scan in a loop, or is there a better way?

Thanks
CP

[hakre]

hi cedarplank,

welcome to webmasterworld.

a good starting place is the php manual. there are so called directory functions you can use to read out a directory. afterwards you use filesystem functions to read in these files content. the manual is full of useable examples and usercomments - just a very helpfull place.

after reading in the files there comes the in my opinion hardest part: you need to parse these file on your own to get out the content you want. in case these are xhtml files, you can use xml functions (it's in the manual, too) to do the job more easily.

--hakre