CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregexcharacter-encoding
user7094
user7094

Reputation:

Scrape a price off a website

I'm trying to scrape a price from a web page using PHP and Regexes. The price will be in the format £123.12 or $123.12 (i.e., pounds or dollars).

I'm loading up the contents using libcurl. The output of which is then going into preg_match_all. So it looks a bit like this:

$contents = curl_exec($curl);

preg_match_all('/(?:\$|£)[0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]{2})?/', $contents, $matches);

So far so simple. The problem is, PHP isn't matching anything at all - even when there are prices on the page. I've narrowed it down to there being a problem with the '£' character - PHP doesn't seem to like it.

I think this might be a charset issue. But whatever I do, I can't seem to get PHP to match it! Anyone have any ideas?

(Edit: I should note if I try using the Regex Test Tool using the same regex and page content, it works fine)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1538

Answers (3)

Patrick Desjardins
Patrick Desjardins

Reputation: 140953

Have you try to use \ in front of £

preg_match_all('/(\$|\£)[0-9]+(\.[0-9]{2})/', $contents, $matches);

I have try this expression with .Net with \£ and it works. I just edited it and removed some ":". alt text
(source: clip2net.com)

Read my comment about the possibility of Curl giving you bad encoding (comment of this post).

Upvotes: 1

OIS
OIS

Reputation: 10033

This should work for simple values.

'#(?:\$|\£|\€)(\d+(?:\.\d+)?)#'

This will not work with thousand separator like 234,343 and 34,454.45.

Upvotes: 0

Eimantas
Eimantas

Reputation: 49354

maybe pound has it's html entity replacement? i think you should try your regexp with some sort of couching program (i.e. match it against fixed text locally).

i'd change my regexp like this: '/(?:\$|£)\d+(?:\.\d{2})?/'

Upvotes: 0

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