Help with Final PHP Project?

mcs7200

I am not sure if anyone can help me, but I am doing a PHP project for a final project in school. Here is the question at hand:

Design a "data scavenger" using server-side techniques. The scavenger should use links -dump or similar techniques in PHP to gather information in some knowledge domain. The software should then construct questions and answers and should present questions to users in multiple choice format. Your script will have to parse the HTML input from the various sites used, and for example, to recognize various forms of questions (who, when, what, where, etc.) and to construct meaningful wrong answers in addition to the correct answer.

I am not sure of how to build that information dynamically by taking any random website?

Any help is welcome! Thank you very much!

Shrike

It will be impossible to write a parser to handle any old HTML and build something meaningful. You would need to know the structure of the webpage in order to parse it sensibly.

Your script will have to parse the HTML input from the various sites used.

That implies that there is at least a list of possible sources, no?

mcs7200

You're right, he (our teacher) says we have to find a page that has some sort of regular data in it.

he said a page with baseball scores would be good.

It could ask questions about winning records, and what was the score last night, and who was the winning pitcher.

Shrike

Ok then it should be straightforward. Pick a webpage which has some kind of tabular data, as you say a list of baseball scores. Then you will have to look in the HTML for something unique which you can search for. You will more than likely want to use regular expression functions to 'scavenge' an HTML table from the webpage.

After that all you really need to do is put each row of the table into a format usable by PHP. A nested array would be sensible. The structure of the array will be very much dependant on the structure of the HTML table. From that you could write a routine to generate a question, e.g.

//Pseudo code
foreach($arraydata as $a)
{
  print "Who won the World Series in $year: $a['teama'] or $a['teamb'] ?";
}

One thing to bear in mind is that screen scraping as this is known is a very fragile method of obtaining information - since you have no control over the source, the website owner might change something very minor and yet it would break your code.

mcs7200

Thanks,

I will try this out and see how it goes!!!