How to extract information from other sites?

[allyse]

Hi,

Ok. fist of all Im not breaking any copyrights with this as its only intended to be used on public pressreleases and those are free to direct copying.

Ok, here it goes.

I lead the norwegian website automotor.no, and Im thinking about an easier method to get the pressreleases...

Any ideas how to do this?

This is what I think. I put some internet adresses in a list, say http://media.ford.com/newsroom/press_releases.cfm as an example. I want a the phpscript to once a day access the page and pick the latest news (if the page was changed).

If the script detects a cange on the site it access the first artice and copy the headline, date and bodytext to a database file...

Is this possibile?

Best regards,
A. Lyse

[ShawnK]

The only way I could see it happening is if the owner of that site gave you access to his database which I doubt he will. They other way you could do is to grab the entire page, but that would also grab that sites layout. So I don't think its possible

[TheDefender]

You can probably use the [man]fopen[/man], [man]fsockopen[/man], [man]fgets[/man] to get the page's content. Once you have the content, you'd need to implement some regexp to drill down the content you are looking for, and then go from there.

You may want to just ask them if they have RSS/XML feeds you can access... It would make things a million times easier.

[Ceril]

Suggesting using Curl library to extract information from webpage, also you need to do some regexping, just flat out recognize the latest news and validate