Reading and parsing webpage

[Anon]

Hi,

I'd like to know if its possible to read the contents of an external webpage into a php variable, which I could then parse to find the information I require from the webpage and output this.

If it is possible, I would be grateful for any help as to how to proceed...

Cheers

Paul

[Anon]

Yes you can do this. I did it by using fsockopen and opening a direct HTTP connection to the page I wanted. It doesn't work for SSL encrypted pages, but basic pages it has no problem retrieving.

//Open 3rd-party connection
$fp = fsockopen($url["host"], $port, $err_num, $err_msg);

  if ($fp) {
     fputs($fp, $header.$request);
     while (!feof($fp)) {
        $response .= fgets($fp, 4096);
       }
     fputs($fp, "Connection: close\r\n\r\n");
     fclose($fp);

The variables $header, and $request hold a valid HTTP header and a POST request string. Then I just keep reading from the server until I get an end of file and finally I close the connection. Now I've got the whole webpage in $response and I can do whatever I want with it.

[Anon]

Hi Paul,

try this:
$fd = fopen ("http://www.domain.net/file.html", "r");
while (!feof ($fd)) {
$buffer = fgets($fd, 4096);
$content.=$buffer;
}
fclose ($fd);

now the content of the external webpage is stored in '$content'

hth
Chris

[amcgrath]

Or the file() function... I used it grab very specific data from the page....