get data between inverted commas and more - php

Question

i have aproblem for a few days right now :s ...
I'm trying to get some changing data inside a string, the string is something like this:
<docdata>
<!-- News Identifier -->
<doc-id id-string ="YBY15349" />
<!-- Date of issue -->
<date.issue norm ="2012-09-22 19:52" />
<!-- Date of release -->
<date.release norm ="2012-09-22 19:52" />
</docdata>
What i need is only the date inside the "2012-09-22 19:52" , the string its stored in some type of xml, malformed by the way. So i can't use normal xml parser, i load/read the file already to change some charset
$fname = $file;
$fhandle = fopen($fname,"r");
$content = fread($fhandle,filesize($fname));
str_replace("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>", "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"?>", $content);
etc..
this work like a charm, but with the string i cant use it.
I try with preg_match_all but i can`t get it right.
Its there a simple way to search this value
<date.issue norm ="2012-09-22 19:52" />
and get just the date in a variable?
thanks in advance and sorry for my english.

Answer 1

From the PHP documentation:
file_get_contents() is the preferred way to read the contents of a file into a string. It will use memory mapping techniques if supported by your OS to enhance performance.
Consequently, your code would become:
$content = file_get_contents($file);
$content = str_replace("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>", "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"?>", $content);
preg_match_all('/date\.issue norm ="([^"]+)" /', $content, $date);
The default behavior is to store the parenthesized matches in the array $date[1]. Therefore, you might loop through $date[1][0], $date[1][1], and so on.

Answer 2

A regular expression to match the following:
<date.issue norm ="2012-09-22 19:52" />
Would be:
/<date\.issue\s*norm\s*="([^"]*)"/
In code:
preg_match_all('/<date\.issue\s*norm\s*="([^"]*)"/', $content, $matches);
// $matches[1] contains all the dates

Answer 3

Instead of using
fopen($filename)
use
$filename = '/path/to/file.xml';
$filearray = file($filename) // pulls the while file into an array by lines
$searchstr = 'date.issue';
foreach($filearray as $line) {
if(stristr($line,$searchstr)) { // <-- forgot the )
$linearray = explode('"',$line);
// your date should be $linearray[1];
echo $linearray[1]."\n"; // to test your output
// rest of your code here
}
}
this way you search the whole file for your search string and the malformed xml shouldnt be a problem.