Combining text from multiple webpages into one single page

patwa

Hi guys and gals,I'm new to the forums and just wanted to say Hi to you all. Having said that, I've been wondering about something for some time and would appreciate your thoughts and help on this matter.

I want to write a PHP script that will in essence copy text from a number of webpages and paste it into just one single page - i.e combining all the text of the seperate pages into one big page. The layout of each page is the same, so if it was possible to set markers between which the text would be copied (i.e from after the heading adverts to just before the links at the bottom of the page) that would be good. The pages URLS are in ascending order, e.g www.site.com/1/, www.site.com/2/, www.site.com/3/ and so on. So maybe a loop that will count up until the 'file not found' error occurs, indicating the end of that set of pages.

I know that as the pages will not be accessible as 'files' the process of manipulating the text might be different, but I hope that as the layout of each page is essentially the same apart from the actual text being copied, this might help the problem. The source code of the page, even if it is generated by PHP should therefore be the same, as only the desired text will change and be replicated as html in that page's source code.

If anyone has any ideas on this, I'd be most grateful. Please understand that I am new to PHP, although I do love web design and am very keen to learn more (I'm in the process of updating mhy own site at the moment to support my PC building enterprise and online selling). Therefore please try not to drop me in too deep to start with, lol!

Thanks in advance, and hope to hear from ya soon.

Hussein.

_theworks

You wanna look up [man]include[/man] or [man]require[/man] (they both do the same thing...)

the file that gets the infomation from the other files would go somthing like this..

<?
//pull up the header..
require('page_header.html');

//pull in the menu
require('left-nav.html');

//and the actualpage..
require('page-content');

//dont forget the footer
require('foot.html');
?>

patwa

Thanks, but I didn't realise you could do that with a webpage which is not on your domain, i.e a public webpage on a totally different site. Also, how would you filter out the bits of the page you didn't want? Can php access the html source or something?

Sorry if this is really basic, but I'm trying to learn and the learning curve is pretty steep.

Hussein.

patwa

Hello again. Another thing, I had a look at the documentation, but I don't think:

include('www.othersite.com/s/1/') as wouldn't there be issue with access permissions, which obviously as I don't have access to the actual files I can't alrer.

I've just realised, that I can do the actual filtering once the page has been 'included' before it is included in my own page to form the combined document referred to in my original post.

Hope that makes sense.