Getting whole HTML element with PHP - php

Question

I want to get the whole element <article> which represents 1 listing but it doesn't work. Can someone help me please?
containing the image + title + it's link + description
<?php
$url = 'http://www.polkmugshot.com/';
$content = file_get_contents($url);
$first_step = explode( '<article>' , $content );
$second_step = explode("</article>" , $first_step[3] );
echo $second_step[0];
?>

Answer 1

You should definitely be using curl for this type of requests.
function curl_download($url){
// is cURL installed?
if (!function_exists('curl_init')){
die('cURL is not installed!');
}
$ch = curl_init();
// URL to download
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
// User agent
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Set your user agent here...");
// Include header in result? (0 = yes, 1 = no)
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
// Should cURL return or print out the data? (true = retu rn, false = print)
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
// Timeout in seconds
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
// Download the given URL, and return output
$output = curl_exec($ch);
// Close the cURL resource, and free system resources
curl_close($ch);
return $output;
}
for best results for your question. Combine it with HTML Dom Parser
use it like:
// Find all images
foreach($output->find('img') as $element)
echo $element->src . '<br>';
// Find all links
foreach($output->find('a') as $element)
echo $element->href . '<br>';
Good Luck!

Answer 2

I'm not sure I get you right, But I guess you need a PHP DOM Parser. I suggest this one (This is a great PHP library to parser HTML codes)
Also you can get whole HTML code like this:
$url = 'http://www.polkmugshot.com/';
$html = file_get_html($url);
echo $html;

Answer 3

Probably a better way would be to parse the document and run some xpath queries over it afterwards, like so:
$url = 'http://www.polkmugshot.com/';
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
$articles = $xml->xpath("//articles");
foreach ($articles as $article) {
// do sth. useful here
}
Read about SimpleXML here.

Answer 4

extract the articles with DOMDocument. working example:
<?php
$url = 'http://www.polkmugshot.com/';
$content = file_get_contents($url);
$domd=#DOMDocument::loadHTML($content);
foreach($domd->getElementsByTagName("article") as $article){
var_dump($domd->saveHTML($article));
}
and as pointed out by #Guns , you'd better use curl, for several reasons:
1: file_get_contents will fail if allow_url_fopen is not set to true in php.ini
2: until php 5.5.0 (somewhere around there), file_get_contents kept reading from the connection until the connection was actually closed, which for many servers can be many seconds after all content is sent, while curl will only read until it reaches content-length HTTP header, which makes for much faster transfers (luckily this was fixed)
3: curl supports gzip and deflate compressed transfers, which again, makes for much faster transfer (when content is compressible, such as html), while file_get_contents will always transfer plain