CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpvariables
Peter Kazazes
Peter Kazazes

Reputation: 3628

Get text from a foreign page in PHP

I need to pull a section of text from an HTML page that is not on my local site, and then have it parsed as a string. Specifically, the last column from this page. I assume I would have to copy the source of the page to a variable and then setup a regex search to navigate to that table row. Is that the most efficient way of doing it? What PHP functions would that entail?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 87

Answers (2)

graup
graup

Reputation: 1099

  • Scrape the page HTML with file_get_contents() (needs ini value allow_url_fopen to be true) or a system function like curl or wget
  • Run a Regular Expression to match the desired part. You could just match any <td>s in this case, as these values are the first occurrences of table cells, e.g. preg_match("/<td.*?>(.*?)<\/td>/si",$html,$matches); (not tested)

Upvotes: 2

Troy
Troy

Reputation: 1639

If you can use URL fopen, then a simple file_get_contents('http://somesite.com/somepage') would suffice. There are various libraries out there to do web scraping, which is the name for what you're trying to do. They might be more flexible than a bunch of regular expressions (regexes are known for having a tough time parsing complicated HTML/XML).

Upvotes: 1

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