Not even sure how to ask this

[searles2sels]

I'm new to PHP, and have taught myself the basics. However, I'm currently trying to write something and I have no idea how to even go about doing it, or if PHP is the right language to use. Here's what I'd like to do:

There's a website that updates every night at midnight. I'd like to put an area on my site that shows what the new item updated is. This would include grabbing a string and an image. What would be the best way to go about this? Thanks!

pj

[cheerio]

Make a cron job to be run every midnight in cPanel if you have it. That's pretty much it, but the cron job should make a certain PHP file run which will do the grabbing string/image and updating.

You can also use a PHP cache system if you can't make a cron job that gets a new string/image every 24 hours (maybe not exactly at midnight, but it updates only when it needs to)

[searles2sels]

I'm not quite to the point of understanding Cron Job yet...

[cheerio]

lol, same with me. You'll have to search google about cron jobs, i've never had much experience with them yet, all i know is that they do stuff for you 😛

[etully]

First, make a script in PHP that reads the remote web site. Look into the fopen command. This will obtain all the HTML from the remote page and put it into a variable. Now you can look through that variable for the new content. If you know that the content is always in a certain place in the HTML, you will be able to use the ereg command to find the content which you will write to a text file or store in a database. Likewise, you will be able to use ereg to find the name of the new graphic that you want. You might have to make a system call from PHP to run wget to obtain the graphic. Save the graphic in some certain place on your server. This whole process is called "scraping" the other web site.

Call that script "obtain_data.php" or something like that. Test it a bunch of times to make sure that it is scraping correctly.

Once you have the script working the way you want it to, then you make a cron job that runs your script (obtain_data.php) once a day, every day at 3:00 am. (You don't want to run it at midnight because they might still be uploading their data. Give them a chance to get their content up). Cron is just a scheduler. Cron can run your script once a minute, once a day, once an hour, or even something fancy like "once every half hour from 5:00 am to 8:00 pm".

Now that your script is scraping the remote web site and storing the data, you need to modify your web site to read the data from your database and display the "borrowed" content and display an image tag that displays the new image that you have on your server.

This is an ambitious project because it will force you to learn fopen, wget, mysql, and regular expressions but it's a good project to know how to do.

[searles2sels]

thank you! projects are the best way for me to learn, and this will certainly be a big one. I appreciate your help.