Reading source code of a page on a different site.

coppercoins

Say I wanted to point to a URL and have PHP read the source of the file at that URL and look for regular expressions (HTML tables) and copy what it finds to a variable for use in my content. Is this possible, and can someone point me to the functions that would perform this task?

laserlight

You can try [man]fopen/man and [man]fsockopen/man

cosminb

readfile()

Moonglobe

readfile() just outputs the whole file. that's notwhat he wants.

swr

There's [man]file_get_contents[/man] which replaces the need for the fopen/while/fread/fclose thing. But it's only available in 4.3.0 and later.

mtimdog

Make sure what you're mooching is public/open domain and not intellectual property, otherwise you're stealing.

dave420

mtimdog - no, you've been listening to RIAA for too long. If he copies it, it's copyright infringement, not stealing. Also, he's entitled to fair use, such as using it in a critical work.

The world of copyright isn't as black and blacker as RIAA/MPAA would have you think.

mtimdog

wooowww...don't put me in the boat with the RIAA.

Using this method, one could almost (but not quite with logins, etc) copy an entire site (even a dynamically created one if you modded it a bit).

I apologize for using too broad a word (stealing) for copyright infringement. My intention was not to debate the law, but to have coppercoins determine for himself (in his situation) if this was ethically moral or not. Yes, he could be doing the equivalent of an RSS feed, or he could be using it to blah blah blah. I just wanted him/her to think about it.

dave420

hehehe - it's alright mate. I wasn't picking you up on it, just trying to illustrate the difference. 🙂

RSS is the future 😉