echoing a variable

Question

I'm making a search engine, and one of the features will be that it searches Google, among other things. The first thing I did was find out how to generate a Google search based on URL alone. Well, "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1542&bih=928&q=" is the first part, "Query" is the second part, and "&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&qscrl=1" is the third part. Now, on the client-side I made a form I called "search", and the action was the file below. However, my attempts to make this plausible on server-side have failed completely. Below is the code:

    <?php

  $something = $_REQUEST["search"];
  $txt1="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1542&bih=928&q=";
  $txt2 = $something;
  $txt3="&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&qscrl=1";
  $string=$txt1.$txt2."+".$txt3;

  $link_to_dig = $string;

  $original_file = @file_get_contents($link_to_dig);
  if(!$original_file)
    die("Error loading {$link_to_dig}");

  $path_info = parse_url($link_to_dig);
  $base = $path_info['scheme'] . "://" . $path_info['host'];

  $stripped_file = strip_tags($original_file, "<a>");
  $fixed_file = preg_replace("/<a([^>]*)href=\"\//is", "<a$1href=\"{$base}/", $stripped_file);
  $fixed_file = preg_replace("/<a([^>]*)href=\"\?/is", "<a$1href=\"{$link_to_dig}/?", $fixed_file);
  preg_match_all("/<a(?:[^>]*)href=\"([^\"]*)\"(?:[^>]*)>(?:[^<]*)<\/a>/is", $fixed_file, $matches);

  //DEBUGGING


  //$matches[0] now contains the complete A tags; ex: <a href="link">text</a>
  //$matches[1] now contains only the HREFs in the A tags; ex: link

  $result = print_r($matches, true);
  $result = str_replace("<", "&lt;", $result);
  print "<pre>" . $result . "</pre>";

?>

Thanks for helping!

This is the form:

<form class="searchengine" name="search" action="search.php" method="post">
<input type="text" style="width:580px; height:35px; color:#000000;" class="search" name="search" />
</form>

Answer 1

I'm assuming you're very new to php and have gotten this script from somewhere and trying to modify it to fit.

echo - Output one or more strings - No value is returned.

So:

$txt2 = echo "$something"

First off it fails because there is no ending semicolon.

Is printing $something to the screen, and $txt is being set to nothing.

You do already have the value in $something, so I don't know why you'd want to change it to another variable, but this will do it:

$txt2 = $something;

Then if you want to make the script nicer, the majority of people on SO will point you towards DOMDocument .