PHP Scrape; save as variables for MySQL Insert - php

Question

I'm successfully scraping a website to get space separated data off of the page:
$html = file_get_contents("http://www.somewebsite.com");
$scores_doc = new DOMDocument();
$scores_doc->loadHTML($html);
$scores_path = new DOMXPath($scores_doc);
$scores_row = $scores_xpath->query('//td[#class="first"]');
foreach($scores_row as $row){
echo $row->nodeValue . "<br/>";
}
Example output:
23 Crimmons, Bob (CA)
48 Silas, Greg (RI)
82 Huston, Roger (TX)
21 Lester, Terry (NC)
Instead of printing the output using 'echo' I need to split the value into four smaller pieces and into variables (array or otherwise). I know the MySQL side very well, I just don't use PHP day to day. I tried (in place of the 'echo' and after defining it as an array):
$data[] = echo $row->nodeValue;

Answer 1

A sidenote on the used syntax:
If you just want to assign the whole 23 Crimmons, Bob (CA) string as one string to an array. You should use the right syntax.
$data[] = echo $row->nodeValue;
Should be:
$data[] = $row->nodeValue;
Three possible solutions to your problem.
Solution 1: Improve scraping
The best way to scrape those four values seperately would be to query more specifically. You can try to update your xpath query on line:
$scores_xpath->query('//td[#class="first"]');
The query you can use depends on the structure of the page you're scraping.
Solution 2: Splitting string using PHP explode
You could use PHP's explode function to separate the string, but note that will give some problems when there are spaces used in a name.
echo $row->nodeValue . "<br/>";
Can be something like:
// Assuming that $row->nodeValue will have the string `23 Crimmons, Bob (CA)` as it's value
$explodeRow = explode(' ', $row->nodeValue);
/*
* $explodeRow now contains four values.
*
* $explodeRow[0] = "23";
* $explodeRow[1] = "Crimmons,";
* $explodeRow[2] = "Bob";
* $explodeRow[3] = "(CA)";
*/
You can choose to remove the ( and ) characters in $explodeRow[3] with the PHP str_replace, preg_replace or substr function for example.
Solution 3: Splitting string using regular expressions
Alternatively you can decide to fetch the first two numbers first. Then to fetch the last part between (). Then seperate the two remaining values by ,. But this can also generates problems when multiple commas are used.
Example of this solution will be, something like:
preg_match("~^(\d+)~", $row->nodeValue, $number);
$number[1]; # will be 23
preg_match("#\((.*?)\)#", $row->nodeValue, $last);
$last[1]; # will be CA
$middleExp = explode("(", $row->nodeValue, 2);
$middle = substr((strlen($number[1])-1), strlen($row->nodeValue), $middleExp[0]);
$middleExp2 = explode(",", $middle);
$middleL = $middleExp2[0]; # will be Crimmons
$middleR = $middleExp2[1]; # will be Bob