Get certain link from another site?

[Blaqspade]

Ok so I'm not real sure how hard this would because I havent worked with PHP in quite some time as you can tell this account is very old and I started it when I took a PHP class at my high school so my knowledge is limited.

Anyways My question is this, Is there a way to have php look at a couple different websites and if a certain link (predefined in a list of links to look for) is displayed on one of the page's it will take all the html in that link starting from <a>......to...... </a> and display it on my website...

[YAOMK]

sure, just search on google for php html scraping.

[bradgrafelman]

Now when you say "look at", how in-depth are you talking about? Are you saying you want to pass a domain to the script - e.g. phpbuilder.com - and have it crawl that entire site, following all links while searching for the link you specify?

If not, it could be as simple as:

$data = file_get_contents('http://theirsite.com/the_page.html');
$data .= file_get_contents('http://a-different-site.com/that_page.html');

$the_url = 'http://your-link-here.com/page.html';
$pattern = '@<a.*href=["\']' . preg_quote($the_url, '@') . '["\'].*>(.*)</a>@siU';
if(preg_match($pattern, $data, $matches)) {
    // link found! here it is:
    echo "<a href=\"$the_url\">" . $matches[1] . '</a>';
}

Note that this would require you to type in the link exactly as it would appear on the remote sites.