parsing dutch bidders from eBay auction

Anon

I am a PHP newbie, slowly plugging along with my coding skills but am stumped on how to do this. I want to parse the winning dutch bidders from an eBay auction to enter into a mySQL database. I have parsed the html down to a chunk ($dutchbidderschunk) such that each unique bidder ID is preceded immediately by requested= and followed immediately by &iid. I can get the first bidder using

preg_match('/requested=(.*)iid=/', $dutchbidderschunk, $bidders);

well, kind of, the & symbol is still there. I am assuming I need to use preg_match_all to get them all but I don't know how to deal with an array containing an array. I think I just need a single line of code but I just don't have the skills. I've been trying for hours and my brain is turning to mush. If anyone can help me they'll be my hero. If you need an example of a dutch auction you can use this one:

http://cgi3.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBidsDutchHighBidder&item=1342547501&ed=

(not my auction).

Thanks in advance,
Gerald

Anon

Just feed this function the entire page, it'll spit back an array of the winners.

function get_winners($page) {
$prefix = preg_quote('<a href="http://contact.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ReturnUserEmail&requested=', "/");
$suffix = preg_quote('&iid=1342547501">', "/");
preg_match_all("/$prefix(.*)$suffix/", $page ,$winners);
return($winners[1]);
}

Anon

that will only match winners of that particular item, just replace the suffix line with this:

$suffix = preg_quote('&amp;', "/");

Should work fine then.

🙂

Anon

Thank you so much, works perfectly. Now I'm having a problem parsing the quantity won by each bidder. Using

$qprefix = preg_quote('<td align="middle" width="10%">', "/");
$qsuffix = preg_quote('</td>', "/");
preg_match_all("/$qprefix(.*)$qsuffix/", $dutchbidderschunk ,$quantityeach);
$quantitywon = $quantityeach[1];

I get alternating quantity won and bid amount in the resulting array as both are enclosed by '<td align="middle" width="10%">' and '</td>'. Is there a way to match only those without the dollar sign, or every other row? Thanks in advance.