parsing html table into a mysql db

Anon

hi all
i would like to know if anyone knows how i can parse a html table from a website and then throw the columns into an array and put them into a mysql database. we need to be able to pull live golf scores from http://www.pgatour.com/scoring/pgatour/ and put the results into a db so that we dont have an fopen query going out to the pga site everytime someone opens our front page and also for speed of course.

i have managed to grab the table no problems via fopen and display it on a page but can't figure out how to parse it into a mysql db.

we would need the something that checked the page for new data every five minutes so the scores were up to date and as the box is at an ISP we could not run a cron job.

thanks in advance
jason

brianp726

Did you ever get a reply to this? I am looking to do almost the exact same thing.

bradgrafelman

While you could use [man]DOM[/man] to parse an HTML document and navigate through its nodes, there's a problem with this "screen scraping" method of getting the data:

It's just about the worse method of getting external data. The business logic of an application shouldn't, IMHO (and probably many others'), be dependent upon markup generated for display purposes, such as HTML.

In other words, a change in the way an external source displays its data to users (via HTML/CSS/etc.) shouldn't break the method you use to pull in that data.
It's often illegal since many sites' TOS/AUP/etc. explicitly prohibit the use of automated requests and/or the use of their data without permission.
If it isn't illegal or you do have explicit permission, then there's a good chance that the external entity has set up some interface designed for automated requests, such as an RSS/XML feed, a REST/SOAP API, etc.