How to pull data from HTML - php

Question

I am trying to write a PHP Script to pull snow and other data from http://www.snowbird.com/mountain-report to display via an LED array. I am having troubles with getting the data I need. I can't seem to be able to find a way to make it work. I've read about PHP not being the best tool for this? Would I be able to make this work, or would I have to go about and use a different language? Here is the code I cant seem to get working.
<?php
include_once('simple_html_dom.php');
// create curl resource
$ch = curl_init();
// set url
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.snowbird.com/mountain-report/");
//return the transfer as a string
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
// $output contains the output string
$output = curl_exec($ch);
// close curl resource to free up system resources
curl_close($ch);
$output = ($output);
$html = new DOMDocument();
$html = loadhtml( $content);
$ret1 = $html->find('div[id=twelve-hour]');
print_r ($ret1);
$ret2 = $html->find('#twenty-four-hour');
print_r ($ret2);
$ret3 = $html->find('#forty-eight-hour');
print_r ($ret3);
$ret4 = $html->find('#current-depth');
print_r ($ret4);
$ret5 = $html->find('#year-to-date');
print_r ($ret5);
?>

Answer 1

This is an ancient question, but it's easy enough to provide an answer for it. Use an XPath query to get the correct node's text value. (This should be as easy as passing the URL directly to DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile() but the server is requests based on user agent so we have to fake it.)
<?php
$ctx = stream_context_create(["http"=>[
"user_agent"=>"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0"
]]);
$html = file_get_contents("http://www.snowbird.com/mountain-report/", true, $ctx);
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadHTML($html, LIBXML_NOWARNING|LIBXML_NOERROR);
$xp = new DomXpath($doc);
$root = $doc->getElementById("snowfall");
$snowfall = [
"12hour" => $xp->query("div[#id='twelve-hour']/div[#class='total-inches']/text()", $root)->item(0)->textContent,
"24hour" => $xp->query("div[#id='twenty-four-hour']/div[#class='total-inches']/text()", $root)->item(0)->textContent,
"48hour" => $xp->query("div[#id='forty-eight-hour']/div[#class='total-inches']/text()", $root)->item(0)->textContent,
"current" => $xp->query("div[#id='current-depth']/div[#class='total-inches']/text()", $root)->item(0)->textContent,
"ytd" => $xp->query("div[#id='year-to-date']/div[#class='total-inches']/text()", $root)->item(0)->textContent,
];
print_r($snowfall);