Extracting names from a website

kevinkhan

Hi guys..

Im have a problem with this piece of code

<?
  set_time_limit(-1);
  ob_implicit_flush(1);
  flush();
	ob_end_flush();

$strURL = "";
if(isset($_POST["crawlUrl"]))
	$strURL = $_POST["crawlUrl"];

function getMatches($strMatch,$strContent) 
  {
		if(preg_match_all($strMatch,$strContent,$objMatches))
    {
			return $objMatches;
		}
		return "";
	}
?>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
  <form name="frmExtract" method="post" action="">
URL: <input name="crawlUrl" type="text" id="crawlUrl" size="50" value="<? print $strURL;?>" > 
     <input name="btnCrawl" type="submit" value="Crawl Data">
  </form>
  <br>
  <br>
<?
	if($strURL != "") 
  {
		$strListingUrl = $strURL;
		while(true) 
    {	

		$strContent = file_get_contents($strListingUrl);

		$strListMatches = '!<li class="vehicle-images"><a href=".*?" title=".*?"><span>.*?</span></a></li>!isU';
		$objListMatches = getMatches($strListMatches,$strContent);	                   

     print_r($objListMatches[1]);

		if($objListMatches == "" || count($objListMatches[1]) == 0) 
  {
			print "No List found or Invalid URL<br>";
		} 

	}
}

?>
</body>
</html>

I want to extract the titles of ads from my site

http://www.carzone.ie/search/results?searchsource=browse&cacheBuster=1256634750309620#nParam=200590%2B219%2B147&sortby=County|1&channel=CARS&currency=EUROS&searchResultsView=SPREADSHEET&maxrows=30&page=1

Can anybody help me?

What is wrong with the code as it doesnt seem to be working 🙁

What does the characters ! mean in this regular expression

'!<li class="vehicle-images"><a href=".*?" title=".*?"><span>.*?</span></a></li>!isU';

and also what does the isU mean?

Thanks

dagon

kevinkhan;10932189 wrote:
I want to extract the titles of ads from my site

as its your site cant you extract them directly from the db, much more efficient than screen scrapping

kevinkhan

Yes but im trying to learn php and iv come up with this method but am running into a few problems

dagon

kevinkhan;10932189 wrote:
What does the characters ! mean in this regular expression

It marks the beginning and end of the pattern

kevinkhan;10932189 wrote:
and also what does the isU mean?

Pattern Modifiers