[RESOLVED] Getting information from other web sites

ditusade

Hi,
Just wanted to know if anyone knows how to extract data on other web sites as and when they get refreshed using PHP or other tools.
E.g If I want to capture all new posting on a particular forum/feedback page and wanted to format the data for my purpose.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated
Thanks
Dave

drew010

using [man]file_get_contents[/man] is one of the easiest ways to fetch the html of a remote page. regular expressions may be useful for extracting data from certain areas of the html. see [man]preg_match[/man] for a regex function.
you may want to run the script every few minutes with a cronjob or the windows task scheduler.

ditusade

Thanks Drew. Do you have a sample code structure of readout a web page (e.g yahoo.com) ... I can thereafter manage using file_get_contents and preg_match to stip out necessary info. Thanks a lot.

bradgrafelman

So you're talking about grabbing a page and stripping out pieces of information from it that are updated at certain intervals? If this is legit in the least, contact the owner of the site and ask them if they would be interested in setting up an RSS/XML feed for you - these solutions are designed just for this.

Otherwise, I don't understand what you're asking. A sample 'readout' would be to open your browser, go to http://www.yahoo.com and view the page source.

MarkR

Ask the developer of the other site for permission, then to provide a machine readable feed.

Then read that.

It will save you trouble and legal hassle.

Screen-scraping is an extremely dangerous technique, both in a technical and a legal sense.

Get an agreement in place before syndicating someone's data.

Mark