[RESOLVED] Checking EXTERNAL website for text string.

JamieThompson

Just wanted some quick advice,
What would the best aproach be to read an external website page, check if a text string exists or not. I dont need to reuse the data, just need a true false flag.
Any ideas?
I know its possilble, I was using it a while back as a link checker before I switched to the new code. But cant think of what it was. Stumped.
Thanks
=]

NogDog

If your PHP configuration allows URL fopen wrappers (generally, most do), you can simply use [man]file_get_contents/man to read the page contents, specifying the desired URL as its argument. Then you can use any of several string functions or [man]preg_match/man to check for the presence of a given string.

JamieThompson

Okie dokies, made a little bit progress thanks for the tip.

Ive went down the lines of using eregi.
Im using the REGEX:

(At ([1-9]|1[0-2]):[0-5]0-9 : ([0-9]+).([0-9]+) p)

To match:
At 4:35PM : 104.40 p
However it fails?
Using file_get_contents will it return the source rather than than what is displayed.

<html>
<head>
  <title>Stock Quote from Yahoo Finance</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
$symbol='NRK.L';
$theurl="http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=$symbol";
  if (!($contents = file_get_contents($theurl)))
  {    echo 'Invalid URL';  exit; }

//At 4:35PM : 104.40 p 
// At 4:35PM :</small><big><b>104.40 p In source
 $pattern = '(At ([1-9]|1[0-2]):[0-5][0-9]([AP]M) : ([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+) p)';
  if (eregi($pattern, $contents, $quote))
  { 
    echo "<p>";
    echo "$quote[1] $symbol"; 
    echo '</p>';
  } 
  else 
  {
    echo '<p>No quote available</p>';
  };
  ?>

</body>
</html>

Basically im trying to return the price and time of shares retreived from just underneath the input box's at the top.
it looks something like...
NORTHERN ROCK (NRK.L) At 4:35PM : 104.40 p 5.10 (4.66%)
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=nrk.l

If I break down the regex it works. So I can return the time then the price. But idealy i want it in the same statment so I know im getting it from the right place incase of an error in the future if the structure or someother data meets the requirements.

Any ideas what may be wrong?
Thanks, greatly apriciated.
First time I have had to do something like this, just for personal benefit.