Retrieve first 10 comments from .html file - php

Question

I was goog for hours and just cannot find an answer. Please suggest:
Having a .html file that contains only user comments in paragraphs like:
<p>12/02/2012 4:32pm Mark</p>
<p>Hi! it's a nice demo! Really thankful</p>
<hr>
<p>11/02/2012 11:03am Miron</p>
<p>How to change the font size from CFD again?</p>
<hr>
<!-- AND LOADS OF OTHER <P><P> COMMENTS DELIMITED BY <HR> ... -->
There's 1000's of comments structured like this,
I'd like to grab somehow the newest 10 (not by date, just the first 'ten' comments). And I don't know how.
I know I can use jQuery's .load('comments.html') and than remove all the elements but the first 10 comments, or even include the whole file with PHP and than do the .hide() with jQuery... but it's a good idea to load the whole file for just 10 comments?
How to split that file and get inside an <div id="latest_10_comments"></div> the first 10 comments from the comments.html file?

Answer 1

I know you wanted a JavaScript solution but you could do this in PHP by using the explode function.
Something like this:
$comments = explode("<hr>", file_get_contents("/comments.html"));
for($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) {
print($comments[$i]);
}
This creates an array called $comments which is each comment in comments.html separated by a
<hr>
tag.

Answer 2

First, I'd suggest reconsidering your approach to this problem entirely. Why are you storing everything an in HTML file this way? You should either store it as an XML file or store it in your database if you want to dynamically load certain comments on demand.
However, to answer your question you're going to need to use an X/HTML parser like PHP's DomDocument if you want to do this in PHP. Here's a working example...
EDIT (changed to reflect the OP's desired behavior):
$dom = new DomDocument;
$dom->loadHTMLFile("comments.html");
// Get all the P tag elements in the DOM
$comments = $dom->getElementsByTagName('p');
// Get only the first 10
$amount = 10; // number of comments you want
foreach ($comments as $num => $comment_nodes) {
if ($num + 1 > $amount)
break;
echo $comment_nodes->nodeValue, PHP_EOL;
}

Answer 3

Solution 1. You can use a RegEx pattern to match 2 p tags followed by hr and repeat the pattern for 10 times.
Solution 2.
Idea from other answer(CHRIS), but as that has error in PHP, I am suggesting this.
$comments = explode("<hr>", file_get_contents("/comments.html"));
for($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) {
print($comments[$i]);
}

Answer 4

$("<p>").each(function(index, value)
{
//Do what you want here
}
This will cycle through all your <p>. If you know the order of the elements then you can do what you want with them based on index.