Question: So after a bit of stringy business, I was able to get a large chunk of substring from a haystack of string closer to my target after searching the first occurrence of `"getflashmedia"`

```
var_dump($str) = 
    string(1735) "getflashmedia" src="http://www.exampleURL.com/media-name.mp4"></object>
    .../*a haystack of code as string*/"

```

I want to get the URL inside `src` but this is varying in length, so I can't really use the `substr()` function

Answer: 
Use a regular expression, I'd recommend the following: `src="(.*?)"`. 

This expression matches `src="` literally, then starts capturing and stops when it finds another `"`.

```
<?php

$input = 'getflashmedia" src="http://www.exampleURL.com/media-name.mp4"></object>';

preg_match_all('/src="(.*?)"/', $input, $matches);

print_r($matches[1]);

```

Output:

```
Array
(
    [0] => http://www.exampleURL.com/media-name.mp4
)

```

This will get every link, from every src attribute in the input string. If you only need the first, use `preg_match()`.
I would strongly recommend rather than using string functions or regular expressions to parse XML/HTML, you should use XML parsers. You can build a much more reliable scraper this way.

XML parsers can handle situations you may not think of when writing your string handling code. 

See XML Parser: <http://php.net/manual/en/book.xml.php>

Another option is SimpleXML: <http://php.net/manual/en/simplexml.examples-basic.php>

There are a number of libraries suitable for it.