extract certain values from html.

armyof1

This is for where i work. I need a script that can read our suppliers website and then get the values from a table.

Here is what

$fileaddy = 'http://www.mysupplierswebsite.com';

$lines = file($fileaddy);
$l_count = count($lines);
for($x = 0; $x< $l_count; $x++)
{
$curline = $lines[$x];
$linedisp[] = $curline;
}

$step1 = $linedisp[221];

//here is where the data needs to be extracted

echo $step1;

I have tried using "str_replace" like this:

//$step4 = explode('<td valign=top width="', $step1);
//$step5 = strip_tags($step4[$i]);
//$step5 = str_replace ('<img src="../images/buttons/camera_white.gif" width="20" height="15" border="0">', "", $step4[$i]);
//$step6 = str_replace ('100">', "", $step5);
//$step7 = str_replace ('<td valign=top>', "<br>", $step6);
//$step8 = str_replace ('</a></><div align="center"></div></><div align="center"></div></>', "", $step7);

but it wont work.

Lets just say that $linedisp[221] is the following

<a href="product.php?id=12>product name</a><br>

Sureley there is a way to simply get the 'product name' section and remove the rest'?

I know i can use strip_tags for that example but what if $linedisp[221] was the following

<a href="product.php?id=12>product name</a><br><a href=website.php?id=12>product description</a></br>

I need to be able to get both the product name and product description sections. Strip Tags will just combine the 2 making it hard to seperate them.

any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

drew010

using regular expressions can greatly simplify the task and also capture the data you want. if you just want to get the product name try this:

<a href="product.php?id=12>product name</a><br><a href=website.php?id=12>product description</a></br> 

$html = file_get_contents("http://theirsite");

preg_match("/<a href=product\.php\?id=(\d+)>([^<]+)<\/a><\/br><a href=website\.php\?id=\d+>([^<]+)<\/a><\/br>/i", $html, $matches);

print_r($matches);

matches[0] will contain the whole string matched.
matches[1] will have the product id
matches[2] will have the product name
matches[3] will have the description

see how that works out.

to read more about the syntax and usage, go to www.php.net/pcre