Selective extraction of data from external site using DOM PHP web crawler - php

Question

I have this PHP dom web crawler which works fine. it extracts mentioned tag along with its link from a (external) forum site to my page.
But recently i ran into a problem. Like
this is the HTML of the forum data::
<tbody>
<tr>
<td width="1%" height="25"> </td>
<td width="64%" height="25" class="FootNotes2">Hispanic Study Partner - dreamer1984</td>
<td width="1%" height="25"> </td>
<td width="14%" height="25" class="FootNotes2" align="center">02/28/17 01:42</td>
<td width="1%" height="25"> </td>
<td width="8%" height="25" align="Center" class="FootNotes2">0</td>
<td width="1%" height="25"> </td>
<td width="9%" height="25" align="Center" class="FootNotes2">200</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="1%" height="25"> </td>
<td width="64%" height="25" class="FootNotes2">nbme - monariyadh</td>
<td width="1%" height="25"> </td>
<td width="14%" height="25" class="FootNotes2" align="center">02/27/17 23:12</td>
<td width="1%" height="25"> </td>
<td width="8%" height="25" align="Center" class="FootNotes2">0</td>
<td width="1%" height="25"> </td>
<td width="9%" height="25" align="Center" class="FootNotes2">108</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
Now if we consider the above code (table data) as the only statements available in that site. and if i tried to extract it with a web crawler like,
<?php
require_once('dom/simple_html_dom.php');
$html = file_get_html('http://www.sitename.com/');
foreach($html->find('td.FootNotes2') as $element) {
echo $element;
}
?>
It extracts al the data that is inside with a class name as "FootNote2"
Now what if i want to extract specific data in tag, for example names like, " dreamer1984" and "monariyadh" from the first tag/line.
and what if i wanted to extract data from 3rd (skipping the rest) which has same class names.
Please note that i can use "regex" like
preg_match_all('/<td.+?FootNotes2.+?<a.+?<\/a> - (?P<name>.*?)<\/td>.+?<td.+?FootNotes2.+?(?P<date>\d{2}\/\d{2}\/\d{2} \d{2}:\d{2})/siu', $subject, $matchs);
foreach ($matchs['name'] as $k => $v){
var_dump('name: '. $v, 'relative date: '. $matchs['date'][$k]);
}
But i prefer to find solution for this in DOM parser...
Any help is appreciated..

Answer 1

As I said in my comment some text processing is unavoidable, however you can get the text element associated with the td like so :
require_once('dom/simple_html_dom.php');
$html = file_get_html('http://www.sitename.com/');
foreach ($html->find("tr") as $row) {
$element = $row->find('td.FootNotes2',0);
if ($element == null) { continue; }
$textNode = array_filter($element->nodes, function ($n) {
return $n->nodetype == 3; //Text node type, like in jQuery
});
if (!empty($textNode)) {
$text = current($textNode);
echo $text;
}
}
This echoes:
- dreamer1984
- monariyadh
Do with that what you will.
Updated to only find the first td for each tr.

Answer 2

If you want to extract only text (not tags and its contain)
foreach ($html->find("td.FootNotes2") as $element) {
$children = $element->children; // get an array of children
foreach ($children AS $child) {
$child->outertext = ''; // This removes the element, but MAY NOT remove it from the original $myDiv
}
echo $element->innertext."<br>";
}
o/p:
- dreamer1984
02/28/17 01:42
0
200
- monariyadh
02/27/17 23:12
0
108

Answer 3

You have to use regex either way so no sense overcomplicating it:
foreach($html->find('tr') as $tr) {
echo preg_replace('/.* - /', '', $tr->find('td',1)->text()) . "\n";
echo $tr->find('td',3)->text() . "\n";
}
I really don't like apokryfos' approach to this, it's a lot of confusion with no benefit.