Another "Can it be done with PHP" question - Newbie

RARZG

Hi im very new to php and its processing power. Im not after being spoon feed but a little nuge would be of great help.

Im currently looking to update my data base with new products. The products are alredy on the manufactures web site;

http://www.berghaus.com/the_gear/show_products.asp?product_hierarchy_id=1

My thinking was as the info is already online, formated and finished it would be a waste of my time re-typing it all again into my database?

What my project for the code would be simple.
1. Get all of the info from the website.
2. Format the data. ie: stripping all but <ul> . <p> . <il> tags etc
3. Save the data in there own .txt file. ie: prod_001.txt with the name and description in. prod_002.txt with the name and description in.

4. Insert into my local db then upload.

I started myself but as i have said my ambition overpowers my code skills. I can get the info off the webpage but I have to input all the urls into my PHP first which seems it would take as much time to do that as it would for me to just copy and paste from the site itself. My question about the power of PHP is can scripts be wrote to given a page and follow url's set on the the page? and retrive data from say a root page?

Sorry for ranting on but its a case of should i get on with the "long way around" or would it be faster to code something?

Thanks for any help.

Keep coding.

bogu

U should look into this: CURL, Client URL Library Functions
Collect all the info about products (title, description, ..., etc.), add them into your DB, collect all the pictures save them on your server and into your DB, stuff like that, if there are only a few products, u should make this manually...

RARZG

Thanks for the help bogu. Im still not seeing on how CURL is going to help me. Sorry for being a noob!

Will this function extract all data from one root url?

thorpe

Will this function extract all data from one root url?

No. You will need to write this function yourself. It would need to be recursive. You'd basically need it to go to the root url, download the page, filter through the data it contains grabing any urls (and of course while your at it, grabbing the data you actually want) and pass these urls back into the function to start again.

This is not going to be any easy task for someone with little php know how.