This is a PHP Class to help extract text out of documents that are not structured in a processing friendly way. When you want to parse text out of form generated emails for example you can create a template matching the expected incoming mail format while specifying the variable text elements and leave the rest for the class to extract your preformatted variables out of the incoming mails' body text.

Useful when you want to parse data out of:

• Web Pages / HTML documents
• Emails generated from web forms
• Documents with definable templates / expressions

Note: When too many templates are added to the specified templates directory it slows the parsing process in a noticeable manner. This happens since the class runs over all the template files and compares it with the passed text to decide on the most suitable template for parsing.

1.0.2-beta

1- Using composer simply run the following:

$ composer require aymanrb/php-unstructured-text-parser

2- Clone / Copy the files from this repository to you local libs directory:

$ git clone https://github.com/aymanrb/php-unstructured-text-parser.git

<?php
require_once('src/TextParserClass.php');

try{
	$parser = new TextParser('/path/to/templatesDirectory');

	$textToParse = 'Text to be parsed fetched from a file, mail, web service, or even added directly to the a string variable like this';
	echo "<pre>";
		print_r($parser->parseText($textToParse));
	echo "</pre>";
	
}catch (Exception $e) {
    echo '<b>Error:</b> ' . $e->getMessage();
}

1- Grab a single copy of the text you want to parse.

2- Replace every single varying text within it to a named variable in the form of {%VariableName%}

3- Add the templates file into the templates directory (defined in parsing code) with a txt extension fileName.txt

4- Pass the text you wish to parse to the parse method of the class and let it do the magic for you.

If the text documents you want to parse looks like this:

Hi GitHub-er,
If you wish to parse message coming from a website that states info like:
Name: Pet Cat
E-Mail: email@example.com
Comment: Some text goes here

Thank You,
Best Regards
Admin

Then your Template file (example_template.txt) should be:

Hi {%name_of_receiver%},
If you wish to parse message coming from a website that states info like:
Name: {%sender_name%}
E-Mail: {%sender_email%}
Comment: {%comment%}

Thank You,
Best Regards
Admin

The output of a successful parsing job would be:

Array(
	'name_of_receiver' => 'GitHub-er',
    'sender_name' => 'Pet Cat',
    'sender_email' => 'email@example.com',
    'Comment' => 'Some text goes here'
)

"Works perfectly with plain text, HTML tags, special characters and anything else you may wish"