Can PHP extract data from an online text file automatically?

SwissMac

I have been offered some weather data from an online text file on another site for automated inclusion in my website. How can I read this data into my page so that it looks nicely formatted etc? PHP? JavaScript? HTML? Or something else...?

Each line of the textfile starts with:
NAME="thenameofaweatherattribute"

followed by some data.

Each attribute and it's data take up a single line, all lines start with "NAME= " as above.

I am guessing it must be relatively easy with If statements and some sort of parsing and variable assignment going on, but as a complete newbie I am quite confused.

Any suggestions? I don't even know where to start looking for answers! 😕

TIA

Mac

k_shehadeh

It sounds like a standard 'ini' file format. That being the case, you can use the parse_ini_file function which returns an associative array of key/values as stored in the text file. You can look up the function at php.net for more information.

SwissMac

Thanks for your reply! The text file I wish to take info from has the extension .txt not .ini - will this parse_ini idea still work in this case?

k_shehadeh

Yes it will work. The name of the file doesn't matter to the function.

Good luck,
Karim

SwissMac

Karim, many thanks again! I'll try this out tonight (you probably guessed I don't do this website work for a living...). May a thousand blessings be upon you!

superwormy

You should also look at these functions:

www.php.net/fopen
www.php.net/fread
www.php.net/fclose
www.php.net/fsockopen
www.php.net/file

They might be of some help later down the road, they allow you to open sockets / connections to remote computers over HTTP, so you could grab the contents of the file and manipulate it into variables from there.