how to get a value(string) from an external page ?

[kejo]

hello
hope you can help me.

i want to get a value from a page (that doesnt belong to me) and use that value on my script.
how can i do this?

for example, i want to show on my page the number of "firefox downloads", that you read in this page on the right:
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

can anyone help ?
i don't know what method to use.

[NogDog]

Use [man]file_get_contents/man to get the page contents, then probably something like [man]preg_match/man to extract the text of interest from that HTML text.

[Valdhor]

As this data is available as an RSS feed that returns XML you can use the following...

<?php
function parsexml($url)
{
        $content = implode('', file($url));
        $p = xml_parser_create();
        xml_parse_into_struct($p, $content, $vals, $index);
        xml_parser_free($p);
        foreach($vals as $key => $val)
        {
            if($val['type'] != 'cdata') $n[$key] = $val;
        }
        $i = 0;
        foreach($n as $k => $v)
        {
            if($v['type'] == 'open')
            {
                $i++;
                $name[$i] = $v['tag'];

        }
        elseif($v['type'] == 'close')
        {
            $f = $values[$i];
            $n = $name[$i];
            $i--;
            if(count($values[$i])>1)
            {
                $values[$i][$n][] = $f;
            }
            else
            {
                $values[$i][$n] = $f;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            $values[$i][$v['tag']] = $v['value']; 
        }
    }
    return $values[0];
} 

$rss_array = parsexml("http://feeds.spreadfirefox.com/downloads/firefox.xml");
print "<pre>";
print_r($rss_array);
print "</pre>";
?>

If the data you want is not XML check into the CURL function. You may need to write your own parser to get at the sata.

[Weedpacket]

With such a small document a streaming reader may be unnecessarily complex (and I loathe parse_into_struct). Short of things like error checking and formatting the result:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->load('http://feeds.spreadfirefox.com/downloads/firefox.xml');
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$downloads = $xpath->query('/rss/channel/item/description')->item(0)->textContent;
echo $downloads;