finding out number of table rows?

[mitcho]

Hey guys. this is my first post. i will explain what i am trying to achieve.

there is this web page http://marconi.arch.usyd.edu.au/helpdesk/printers.cgi?printer=nasmith which shows the number of printer jobs queued at a printer at my university. as you can see this page has 'Priner Que' table containing the current and most recent jobs.

using PHP i want to find out the (1) number of jobs currently displayed on this page and (2) the size of the top most job.

To find out (1) - the number of jobs currently displayed, i think i need to work out how many <tr> tags are in the 'Printer Que' table and then minus 1 from this number because the first <tr> tag corresponds to the collum titles? is this correct?

and to Find out (2) - the size of the top most job, i am guessing i need to get what is inbetween the 5th set of <td> tags? is this correct?

I have only just begun to use php, so if anyone could post required code to do (1) and (2) that would be excellent and would really help me out.

after using the php code to find out (1) and (2), how would i write this to a txt file or something so that i can parse the data later? At the moment im using php file to get all the information from this table (see attached file) and then i am using flash to view that data. but the only thing i want to do is display (1) and (2) which i want to display in flash.

Please help....🙂

[mitcho]

hey guys,

I was just looking around and reading up on this and i think that this can be done using a php command 'split'.

i have no idea how to do this, but i am told that to work out (1) i would have to Split the html text into an array around the <tr> tags, then count the size of the array. is this correct? if so how would i write that in php?

and also to work out (2) split each row around <td>, then get the fifth element in the row. is this correct? again i have no idea how i would write this in php.

if anyone can lend their programming skills would be much appreciated.