Extract tables from website and rearrange

yujikaido

I am working on a php file to extract tables from a website and rearrange them in a vertically stacked order of a single table.

I know a I need to develop a expression like preq_match() and use a maybe similar to /id=\"table1\" .+<tbody>(.+)<\/tbody>/s but am lost how to get started with my code as I am a beginner. Here is my code so far. I would appreciate any help.

<?php
$homepage = file_get_contents('http://www.cs.iusb.edu/people/faculty.html');


preg_match('id=\"table1\".+\<tbody\>(.+)\<\/tbody\>/s',$homepage,$array);

print_r($array);

?>

Weedpacket

PHP already provides an HTML parser; you shouldn't need to write another one from scratch (and even if you did, using regular expressions is an error-prone way to do it).

To find the table you're looking for in that page:

$homepage = new DOMDocument;
$homepage->loadHTMLFile('http://etc.etc.');
$table1 = $homepage->getElementById('table1');

See the [man]DOM[/man] reference on how to proceed from there.

yujikaido

Thanks for the reply but I am still working on this and not getting anywhere to quick. So far I can input a url and I had it to ouput the website before I started messing with the code. What I want preg_match to do is step 1 is output only table 1 in the body of the website
http://www.cs.iusb.edu/people/faculty.html. then step 2 I want to stack it in a narrow table like this final project. http://www.cs.iusb.edu/~rbatzing/a340/faculty.php

I dont want to use any expression or method but preg_match and I think I need to use preg_match_all for step 2 but I am not sure. Sorry I dont want to use DOM.

here is my code so far. Please help a guy out. I need some guidance please. :queasy: Thanks.

<?
 $url = "http://www.cs.iusb.edu/people/faculty.html";
  $input = @file_get_contents($url) or die('Could not access file: $url');
  if preg_match("/id=\table1\" .+\<tbody\>(.+)\<\/tbody\>/s,$outp);

echo $outp
   ;
?>