Screen scraping example?

nVRuckus

With screen scraping can you pull straight text from a page rather than just an rss feed? If so can someone please give me an example in php4.

I have a page called mydomain.com/index.php?user=12345
I want to grab the text from between

<td>Honorlevel:</td>
<td>
and

</td>

which is only 2 digits and place it to a $output so i can echo it out on my page.

Im learning about scraping so im not sure how to do this or if it is possible.

Kudose

<?php
$Start = "<td><font face=\"Verdana,Arial\" size=\"2\"><B>Honorlevel:</B></font></td>
<td><font face=\"Verdana,Arial\" size=\"2\">";

$End = "</font></td>";

$url = "http://www.website.com/file.php";

// Open the file
$file = fopen("$URL", "r");

// Read the file

if (!function_exists('file_get_contents')) {
     $r = fread($file, 80000);
}
else {
    $r = file_get_contents($URL);
}


// Grab just the contents we want
$stuff = eregi("$Start(.*)$End", $r);

//now you have your data in an $stuff
?>

nVRuckus

doesnt seem to be working for me can you see what im doing wrong?

 <?php 
$Start = "<td><font face=\"Verdana,Arial\" size=\"2\"><B>Honorlevel:</B></font></td> 
<td><font face=\"Verdana,Arial\" size=\"2\">"; 

$End = "</font></td>"; 

$url = "http://aaotracker.4players.de/usertracker.php?userid=254111"; 

// Open the file 
$file = fopen("$url", "r"); 

// Read the file 

if (!function_exists('file_get_contents')) { 
     $r = fread($file, 80000); 
} 
else { 
    $r = file_get_contents($url); 
} 


// Grab just the contents we want 
$stuff = eregi("$Start(.*)$End", $r); 

//now you have your data in an $stuff 
?><?php
echo "honor:";
echo $stuff;
?>

the source from the page is as folows

<td><font face="Verdana,Arial" size="2"><B>Honorlevel:</B></font></td>
    <td><font face="Verdana,Arial" size="2">41</font></td>

so echo $stuff should output 41 correct? cause all i get is honor:

rehfeld

theres a lot of errors in the code that he posted, try this:


<?php

$start = '<td><font face="Verdana,Arial" size="2"><B>Honorlevel:</B></font></td>
<td><font face="Verdana,Arial" size="2">';

$end = '</font></td>';



$start = preg_quote($start, '/');
$end = preg_quote($end, '/');

$url = 'http://www.website.com/file.php';

$document = file_get_contents($url);


preg_match("/$start(.*?)$end/", $document, $matches);

print_r($matches);

this particular situation doesnt even need to use regex. a combination of strpos() and substr() would totally suffice.

but if you plan to do this often, your going to thank yourself big time if you take a few hours to learn the basics of regex.

http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html

nVRuckus

yes i know i have alot to learn with php still.

I tried your code and i am getting Fatal error: Call to undefined function: file_get_contents() in /home/virtual/site13/fst/var/www/html/test.php on line 15

Im running 4.2.2 btw

Kudose

<?php

$start = '<td><font face="Verdana,Arial" size="2"><B>Honorlevel:</B></font></td>
<td><font face="Verdana,Arial" size="2">';

$end = '</font></td>';



$start = preg_quote($start, '/');
$end = preg_quote($end, '/');

$url = 'http://www.website.com/file.php';

$file = fopen("$url", "r"); 

$document = fread($file, 80000);

preg_match("/$start(.*?)$end/", $document, $matches);

print_r($matches);  

?>

nVRuckus

LOL im just having issues.
now my output using the last one is

Array()

nVRuckus

anyone know why it shows an output of array() instead of 41?

 <?php 

$start = '<td><font face="Verdana,Arial" size="2"><B>Honorlevel:</B></font></td> 
<td><font face="Verdana,Arial" size="2">'; 

$end = '</font></td>'; 



$start = preg_quote($start, '/'); 
$end = preg_quote($end, '/'); 

$url = 'http://aaotracker.4players.de/usertracker.php?userid=254111'; 

$file = fopen("$url", "r");  

$document = fread($file, 80000); 

preg_match("/$start(.*?)$end/", $document, $matches); 

print_r($matches);   

?>