Picking up data from other sites with PHP

[minestrone]

Hi,

Im wondering if there is a PHP technology that will allow you to pick up data from third party sites serverside with PHP?

Is this possible?

Thanks

DAvid

[jdorsch]

If you have access to both servers you could use curl or soap to communicate and exchange data. You'll have to read up on them both.

[minestrone]

Sadly we want to screen scrape data from a third party site. I was told the devil ASP could do this but i can't work out how to do it with PHP.

I was thinking about some XML / XSLT thing but i cant seem how to work out how to do it. Im OK with XSLT but i cant work out how to grab the info serverside.

I'm not trying to rip off other peoples content, just make a dynamic football league table using info from another site.

cheers.

[jdorsch]

If you want to screen scrape then look into curl. Using curl you can fetch your page into a string variable by passing a curl function the URL name. Then you can parse that string variable using regular expressions, string search functions, or if the site has well formatted HTML you can read it into a dom object. The dom part might be easier in php 5, but I do know that some pretty good HTML and XML parsers exist for php 4.

Edit: Ignore the last half of my post as I just noticed you are ok with XSLT. Just read up on curl and you should be good to go. You should be able to fetch a page into a string variable with about 3 lines of code or so.

[minestrone]

jdorsch wrote:

If you want to screen scrape then look into curl. Using curl you can fetch your page into a string variable by passing a curl function the URL name. Then you can parse that string variable using regular expressions, string search functions, or if the site has well formatted HTML you can read it into a dom object. The dom part might be easier in php 5, but I do know that some pretty good HTML and XML parsers exist for php 4.

Edit: Ignore the last half of my post as I just noticed you are ok with XSLT. Just read up on curl and you should be good to go. You should be able to fetch a page into a string variable with about 3 lines of code or so.

cheers, i shall look up on curl this evening.

basically the page i wish to grab is

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/scot_prem/table/default.stm

just pick up about 32 bits of info, the HTML/XML is fairly well marked to i recon i can grab the info with XSLT.

cheers