Why do I have an empty Array as result while fetching content? - php

Question

<?php
$page = file_get_contents("https://www.google.com");
preg_match('#<div id="searchform" class="jhp big">(.*?)</div>#Uis', $page, $matches);
print_r($matches);
?>
The following code I wrote, has to grab a specific part of another web page (in this case google). Unfortunately it is not working, and I'm not sure why (since the regular expression itself is grabbing everything inside of the div).
Help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

According to the source of the page you have pasted, there does not exist a line with that structure. This is one of the reasons why parsing HTML with regalar expressions is not recommended.
Using the getElementById() seems to do what you are after:
<?php
$page = file_get_contents("https://www.google.com");
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($page);
$result = $doc->getElementById('searchform');
print_r($result);
?>
EDIT:
You could use the code below:
<?php
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://google.com');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
$page = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($page);
echo($page);
$result = $doc->getElementById('searchform');
print_r($result);
?>
You might need to refer to this question though since you might need to change some settings.

Answer 2

DomxPath would be a better choice for you, here is an example.
<?php
$content = file_get_contents('https://www.google.com');
//gets rid of a few things that domdocument hates
$content = preg_replace("/&(?!(?:apos|quot|[gl]t|amp);|#)/", '&', $content);
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($content);
$xpath = new DomXPath($doc);
$item = $xpath->query('//div[#id="searchform"]');