Help with parsing content from another website

aafraga

Hello
I am a newbie to Php and have a question regarding coding.
I am looking for an elegant way to extract the currency exchange rate for the GBP against the Euro to display on my website.

Thus far I have seen there is a php command file that could import a website. How do I parse out the bid and offer from the table ?

I guess this is how most people would go about it. Any pointers would be much appreciated.
Many thanks and kind regards,
Alberto

<?php
<?
$YahooFX=file('http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/currency-converter/convert?from=GBP&to=EUR');

...
?>

gammaster

Hi!

Try this:

$url     = 'http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/currency-converter/convert?from=GBP&to=EUR';
$html    = file_get_contents($url);
$pattern = "|<td class=\"yfnc_tabledata1\">(.+)</td>|U";
$matches = array();

// Get the stuff.
preg_match_all($pattern, $html, $matches);

// Remove some useless stuff.
$data = $matches[0];
array_shift($data);

// Remove bold tags(<b>xx</b>)
foreach($data as $key => $elem)
   $data[$key] = strip_tags($elem);

// Make keys for a new data array.
$keys = array('pounds', 'date', 'exchangeRate', 'euro', 'bid', 'ask');

// Make the new data array.
$data = array_combine($keys, $data);

// Look at the result.
echo '<pre>';
print_r($data);
echo '</pre>';

samudasu

Since yahoo provides a csv file, here is a very simple way to extract the data.

<?php
$url = 'http://uk.old.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=GBPEUR=X&f=sl1d1t1ba&e=.csv';
$fp = fopen($url, 'r');
$data = fgetcsv($fp, 1000);
print "Symbol: $data[0]<br />\n";
print "Rate: $data[1]<br />\n";
print "Date: $data[2]<br />\n";
print "Time: $data[3]<br />\n";
print "Bid: $data[4]<br />\n";
print "Ask: $data[5]<br />\n";
?>

aafraga

Thank you both Gammaster and samudasu for your help. I see the virtues of both techniques. As I am new to Php and very impressed, I think I will invest more time learning the basics.

FYI, As I would like to grab other bits of information of from other websites (like the current calling charge on www.voipstunt.com to a particular country), I will have to learn how to construct the pattern matching string. Also, my ISP is using php 4.3.10 so I was unable to use array_combine(). Commenting out the line still gave me some results.

Many thanks once again.
Alberto