Extracting data from html tags

[AndrewGB]

I am trying to create a PHP script which opens remote webpages and extracts data within certain html tags, for example... <open> and <close>. I know there are various function in PHP which can open the webpage, so I'd like to know which is best for this task. Also, how do I go about extracting the data from the html tags?

[bradgrafelman]

[man]DOM[/man]

EDIT: Also, welcome to PHPBuilder!

[AndrewGB]

Thanks for that, I'll give it a read in a few minutes.

I should have pointed out the data I need to grab is within hidden comment tags, for example <!-- start comment --> and <!-- end comment -->. Would the DOM functions still be good to grab this data? Additionally, I need to be able to grab the ID number from the example HTML below... and I have no idea how this is done.

<td><b>Number</b></td>
<td>7783J18</td>

Finally, would you recommend using fopen to grab the page, or a different function?

[AndrewGB]

Maybe something like this?

$content = file_get_contents('http://www.sample.com/page.html');
preg_match('<td><b>Number</b></td><td>(.*)</td>', $content, $number);
echo $number;