[RESOLVED] Need help parsing HTML table data using DOMDocument

mrbaseball34

I need some help parsing the info out of the HTML on this page:
http://www.dlis.dla.mil/WebFlis/pub/pub_search.aspx?niin=1660004610707&newpage=1

I need to obtain these values:

 SCHEDULE B: 8803300060  

 ENAC:

If you show how to obtain those values by getting the specific table, I can work my
way around getting the other data I need. I am already getting many of the values I
need; this one is giving me the biggest grief because there is no id on the table that
contains that info.

I am using DOMDocument, loading Tidy cleaned HTML.

mrbaseball34

Anyone?

sneakyimp

how do you intend to know which element in the page you are looking for? It's one thing to look at the page visually, it's another to turn that concept into an algorithm.

mrbaseball34

If you look at thte source to that page, you'll see. It is located in a table that is nested in another table with an id.
For some reason, they neglected to give this table an id.

sneakyimp

I did look at the source to that page and didn't really see anything that jumped out at me as an obvious way to identify this table.

So the table lacks an id? That might explain numerous tables in that page. If a table lacks an 'id' attribute then it also won't have an id. Are you sure this is a unique property of the table you are after?

The point I'm trying to make is that you need to find what, exactly, can consistently identify the page elements you are after. Until you know what that is, there's really no sense in writing any code.

The approach you suggest -- to find a table with an empty id attribute -- might be more easily found using [man]preg_match[/man] than using DOM to parse the entire document.

If, on the other hand, you said "the results I want are in the 3rd row of the 2nd table of the page. The first cell in this row contains a nested table with only 2 rows and I want the 2nd cell in each of those rows" then DOM might be the way to go.

mrbaseball34

Figured it out...
The data is located in two spans that actually have ids.

sneakyimp

so maybe something like this:

$pattern ='/<span[^>]+id="lblScheduleB"[^>]*>.*<\/span>/isU';

$num = preg_match($pattern, $html, $matches);

if (!$num) {
  echo 'no matches found';
} else {
  print_r($matches);
}