Extracting data from html code with php

Riley

I'm pretty new with php, and I'm trying to figure out how I could make a script where html source code can be taken from a site, pasted into a textarea, and then have the form extract certain things from pasted code.

For instance, how would you go about coding a script that takes the source code of a site, and extracts data from a table at the bottom of the page's source code (that you took)?

If anyone can help me get started, or tell me what functions etc I should use, I'd be very thankful. Any kind of help would be great 🙂

Thanks again,

Riley 🙂

weekender

to get a file, you can use the file command - read up at php.net/file - this takes a file from local or from a URL and passes it into an array. Each element of the array contains a line from the file.

To extract certain data really depends on what the data is, what structure it's in and so on, but you'll probably end up using ereg at some point.

Riley

Thanks for the help 🙂

Ok, here's a test script that finds all the "</tr>" tags on cnn.com:
(you can see it here )

<?php
$lines = file ('http://cnn.com');

foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) {
echo "Line #{$line_num} : " . htmlspecialchars($line) . " \n";

if (eregi("</tr>", $line)) {
echo "THIS IS A </TR> TAG \n";
}
}
?>

Now...how could I number the eregi output? So it would be: "THIS IS A </TR> TAG #(number)" ? I've tried a couple things and I can't seem to get it to work. Any additional help would be great 🙂 thanks again!

domhal

if (eregi("</tr>", $line)) {here #1
echo "[cut stuff]";
}

You need to set a counter to zero outwith the initial foreach loop (ie, add a line to the beginning of the script:

$counter = 0;

Also, put in

$counter++;

after the if checking for <TR>'s.

Finally, before the add

"TAG # $counter"

Hope this makes sense!

Domhal