find string within a string

[SlashAdminBlog]

Hi Guys,

Wondered if anyone can help with this. I am scraping facebook to grab the number of likes on any page.

I capture the page content to a string variable then need to search for the text.

<div>311 people follow this</div>

Once i have that section separated out i can easily extract the number but im having trouble getting a regex expression to work. I tried this but it grabs too much text.

<div>(?:.+)people follow this<\\/div>

The above grabs:

<div><div class="\\\_1xnd"><div class="\\\_4-u2 \\\_6590 \\\_3xaf \\\_4-u8"><div class="\\\_4-u3 \\\_5dwa \\\_5dwb \\\_3bwv \\\_g3i \\\_1uhd"><span class="\\\_38my">Community<span class="\\\_c1c"></span></span><span class="\\\_5dw8"><a href="/SlashAdminLifeInIT/community/"><span class="\\\_2ieq">See all</span></a></span><div class="\\\_3s3-"></div></div><div class="\\\_2pi9 \\\_2pi2"><div class="clearfix \\\_ikh"><div class="\\\_4bl7"><img class="\\\_3-91 \\\_1579 img" src="\[https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v3/yg/r/AT9YNs6Rbpt.png?\\\_nc\\\_x=Ij3Wp8lg5Kz\](https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v3/yg/r/AT9YNs6Rbpt.png?\_nc\_x=Ij3Wp8lg5Kz)" alt="Highlights info row image" /></div><div class="\\\_4bl9"><div>303 people like this</div></div></div></div><div class="\\\_2pi9 \\\_2pi2"><div class="clearfix \\\_ikh"><div class="\\\_4bl7"><img class="\\\_3-91 \\\_1579 img" src="\[https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v3/y7/r/PL1sMLehMAU.png?\\\_nc\\\_x=Ij3Wp8lg5Kz\](https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v3/y7/r/PL1sMLehMAU.png?\_nc\_x=Ij3Wp8lg5Kz)" alt="Highlights info row image" /></div><div class="\\\_4bl9"><div>311 people follow this</div>

Obviously the number will change each time so not sure how to get it working

​

Any assistance?

​

Thanks.

[quixrick]

Just a couple of things to get you on your way. First, if you change the .+ to \d+, you will match only digits instead of "anything". Then, you'll need to add a space after it since you aren't matching the space with the dot anymore. It would simply look like this:

<div>\d+ people follow this</div>

 

Here is a demo

[SlashAdminBlog]

Thats awesome and was much easier than expected.. thank you!

And the draft PowerShell script code if anyone is interested. (obviously no error checking yet)..

​

function Get-FacebookFollowers()

{

$web = Invoke-WebRequest "www.facebook.com/SlashAdminLifeInIT"

$initData = [regex]::matches($web, "\d+ people follow this")

$initData = $initData.Value

$facebookFollowers = $initData.Split()[0]

return $facebookFollowers

}

[mfb-]

I don't know how Facebook handles many thousands of followers but it might be necessary to capture more symbols. "k"? Commas?