grabbing data from webpages?

roseplant

I have a rather large static HTML website which I would like to convert to PHP/mySQL. Each page is laid out fairly similarly and there are about 6 'pieces of information' unique to every page - eg name of widget, price, description.

So I need some scripts to parse the pages, retrieve this information and add it to a SQL database. It's not a job i want to do by hand so can you tell me if there are scripts out there that can help?

I should mention I don't know the first thing about data mining/extraction, etc.

AIS4U

roseplant:

"can you tell me if there are scripts out there that can help?"

Well, I am sure there are scripts out there that could help you, but they are all going to be pretty generic. By that I mean I don't think you are going to find a script that you can just download and have it work.

I am sure that your Web pages are very unique in lots of ways and I would think that it would be much faster and just as easy to hand code your new site rather than try and modify some other code.

You obviously have most or all of the HTML side to display your pages so all you would need to do is create your database and tie the two together with a little PHP.

Good Luck

Jack_McSlay

it depends on what you're trying to do. if you have a set group of pages you want to work on, you may be able to acquire data effectively using an fopen() to get the webpage. I can't tell you it's easy, because it's not, such thing will acquire the raw html of the page, so you'll have to parse it to filter out all the formatting of the page and unwanted data. and then a sudden change in the design could likely screw it totally.

this kind of code I woudn't recommend, unless you want something very simple (like acquiring the title)