Retrieving Barometric and Other Climate Data Using simple_html_dom.php - php

Question

I want to periodically (once a day or so) collect the barometric pressure reading for various USA weather stations. Using simple_html_dom.php I can scrape the entire page of this site, for example (https://www.localconditions.com/weather-alliance-nebraska/69301/). However, I don't know how to then parse this down to just the barometric pressure reading: in this case "30.26".
Here's the code that grabs all the html. Obviously the find('Barometer') element isn't working.
<?php
// example of how to use basic selector to retrieve HTML contents
include('simple_html_dom.php');
// get DOM from URL or file
$html = file_get_html('https://www.localconditions.com/weather-alliance-nebraska/69301/');
// find all span tags with class=gb1
foreach($html->find('strong') as $e)
echo $e->outertext . '<HR>';
// get an element representing the second paragraph
$element = $html->find("Barometer");
echo $e->outertext . '<br>';
// extract text from HTML
echo $html->plaintext;
?>
Any advise on how to parse this?
Thanks!

Answer 1

As mentioned by #bato3 in his comment, queries like this are far better handled with xpath. Unfortunately, neither DOMDocument nor simplexml (which I usually use to parse xml/html) could digest the html of this site (at least not when I tried). So we have to do it with simple_html_dom and resort to (somewhat inelegant) CSS selectors and string manipulation:
$dest = $html->find("//div[class='col-sm-6 col-md-6'] > p:has(> strong)");
foreach($dest as $e) {
$target = $e->innertext;
if (strpos($target, "Barometer")!== false){
$pressure = explode(" ", $target);
echo $pressure[2];
}
}
Output:
30.25 inHg.