PHP newb content retrieval

greasedpez

Hey, I am completely new to PHP (just started 2 days ago). My goal is to make a website that can retrieve information from other websites and display it on mine. Specifically, I want to access weekly sales for stores like safeway and post only relevant ones on my site.

I know I'm taking on a lot, but I'm determined to do it. The only programming experience I have is in BASIC and HTML, and that was like 11 years ago when I was 10.

Anyway, I was wondering if someone could at least just point me in the right direction. What commands am I going to need to use to accomplish this? I've tried looking at lists of all commands possible online but they are overwhelmingly large.

What command opens a website and searches for specific words, etc?

Thanks

Wynder

greasedpez wrote:
What command opens a website and searches for specific words, etc?
Thanks

fopen()
preg_match()
strip_tags() -- because you're gonna be getting the HTML source.

Enjoy.

greasedpez

so, say

$str = fopen(("http://www.cnn.com/", "r");

strip_tags($str);

$search = 'iraq';
preg_match_all($search, $str, $matches);
print_r($matches);

will search the main page of cnn.com and search for the term iraq and return how many times it's found?

Wynder

fopen() returns a file pointer -- you use the file pointer in fread() to get the text.... but your code is pretty close. Throw it up on a server and see what kinda errors you get and go on from there. 🙂

That logic is the right track.

greasedpez

and how come when I run this all it returns is "resource id #2"?

Wynder

greasedpez wrote:
and how come when I run this all it returns is "resource id #2"?

See my above post. 🙂 You need to fread() from the file pointer returned from fopen()... You can do it a line at a time, or the whole thing into the string (prolly the best choice there)... Strip the tags, then match for your term.

greasedpez

I don't know if there is something wrong with my server or what, but I can't get this to work whatsoever.

Also, i tried
error_reporting(E_ALL);

and it doesn't come up with anything. Could it be my server? I use yahoo

frost110

the answer is in front of you. There is no error in it. The resource is a valid return variable. www.php.net read about files.

--FrosT

mmilano

if the page you are reading isn't too big, the file() function is pretty easy to work with. it loads a page into an array. each line of the file is one element of the array.

<?
$page_array = file("http://somesite.com/page.html");

// if you wanted it all in one string, you could implode the array
$string = implode("\n", $page_array);
?>

if the page is very big, then it might not be a good idea to load it into memory and then fopen() is better, then read line by line.

greasedpez

How come when i run this:

<?php

$str = fopen("http://www.cnn.com", "rb");
$text = fread($str, 5000);
strip_tags($text);
$search = 'iran';
preg_match_all($search, $text, $matches);
print_r ($matches);

it just outputs

Array()

and sometimes if i change it a little it comes back with this error

PHP Warning: preg_match_all(): Delimiter must not be alphanumeric or backslash in /PHPTESTS/search.php on line 15

what does that mean?

I was under the impression that preg_match is supposed to return the number of times the string is found in the other string