parsing html

clairence

I'm trying to scrape the team names, dates and gametimes from this page:

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/scoreboard

My intent was not any kind of copyright infringement; I simply wanted to collect all the info and put it into database for use with a game I'm working on.

But I'm having problems gathering the day/date from the pages.

Using a preg_match function I found on (this) site, I've gotten the page separated into a large array.

And I've gotten the teams, records, and gametimes into arrays as hoped by using the following:

if (substr($page_array[$i],0,19)=="<a href=\"/nfl/teams")
{
$team[$t][0]=$page_array[$i+1]; // team name
$team[$t][1]=$page_array[$i+4]; // record
$team[$t][4]=$page_array[$i+8]; // game time
$team[$t][2]=$page_array[$i+25]; // opponent
$team[$t][3]=$page_array[$i+28]; // opponent record
if (is_odd($t)){
echo '<div><span><b>'.$team[$t][0].'</b> <small>'.$team[$t][1].'</small></span></div>';
echo "\r\n";
echo '<div><span> at <b>'.$team[$t][2].'</b> <small>'.$team[$t][3].'</small> <i>'.$team[$t][4].'</i></span></div>';
echo "\r\n";
}
$t++;
}
}

That works great. So I tried to load the day/date using a similar process, but it doesn't seem to be working:

if (substr($page_array[$i],1)==" <td colspan=\"3\" height=\"18\" class=\"yspdetailttl\">&nbsp\;")
{
$day[$d]=$page_array[$i+1]; //day and date of game
echo '<div>Date: '.$day[$d].'</div>';
echo "\r\n";
$d++;
}

The string is only used prior to the "Sunday October 8, 2006" and "Monday October 9, 2006", so it should only select those two data points.

I've tried using if ($page_array[$i]== but that didn't work either.

Ironically, the amount of time I've spent on learning this is longer than if I'd just typed all the data in manually.

Any help is appreciated.

bpat1434

Perhaps it would behoove you to find an XML RSS feed to use and parse instead of manually trying to do it from Yahoo!'s page.

greenie2600

bpat1434++. Screen-scraping should only be used as a last resort - it's a pain in the ass to code, and hideously unreliable. If Yahoo! changes their HTML even slightly, it could totally break your screen-scraper.

There's almost certainly some kind of RSS feed or web service out there that can provide the information you need in a much more straightforward format.

clairence

bpat and greenie,

Thanks for the responses.

I agree that XML feeds would be the way to go. I started this quest with a quick search for such a thing. Perhaps I was using the wrong terms or looking in the wrong place, but I couldn't find such a feed (scoreboard).

If you are aware of one I'd greatly appreciate a link.

In the mean time, I have been searching a little more, and found a few other pages that - barring some XML feed materializing - I can scrape far more easily.

This is a simple game that I'm putting on with some friends, so a paid subscription would be overkill.

If I may continue with the question I originally asked (or meant to ask)...

The second substring search seems to be getting hung up on the formatting of the HTML of the source page. The lines of code are multi-tabbed in from the left, I assume for readability.
How would I account for such spacing in a substr search?

Thanks again for the thoughts and any other help...

greenie2600

A tab is just one character, like any other - it just so happens that most programs will render it as several spaces. If you think of each tab as a space, you should be fine.

You may want to consider using regular expressions instead, though - if properly written, they'd be a lot more tolerant of variances in the HTML that's being scraped.