Page Parsing

mberman

I'm looking for a way to take an HTML page, isolate part of it, and store that in a variable. I don't know much about different ways of doing this, but reading around, it seems that the favored (or the only?) way is by using regular expressions.

How do you suggest I got about this? (I'm not looking for code - merely a suggestion of a method/interface/etc.).

Thanks in Advance!

weekender

read up on output buffering (http://uk.php.net/manual/en/ref.outcontrol.php)

basically, you start buffering the output - then have the html, then end the buffer and assign it to a variable

adam

Buddha443556

mberman are you trying to capture bits of your site or someone elses?

Need more details?

If your thinking of scraping someone elses site then read up on spiders and robots.

LordShryku

Originally posted by Buddha443556
If your thinking of scraping someone elses site then read up on spiders and robots.

Also read their TOS, because you may be breaking the law by doing so...

mberman

Thanx for your replies, guys. I'm more interested in principal - but here's an example:

If I have a blog that I write myself (which means no TOS violations ), which does not support a backend syndacation format (RSS, Atom, etc.). I want to include the latest post on a different page in my site.

So, what I want to do, is get the HTML of a page, and somehow isolate a specific part of the code, for instance everything from

<!-- FIRST START -->

<!-- FIRST END -->

. How would it be possible to do this?

drawmack

if the blog is generated from a database then it would probably be easist just to write a little php to pull only the newest entry.

If the blog is static html then just use [man]file[/man] and manipulate the array.