Need help converting my beautiful soup (Python) code to PHP - php

Question

I'm currently in the process of converting all of my beautiful soup code into PHP just to get used to PHP. However i've run into a bit of a problem, my php code will only work when the wiki page has 'External links' after the original run in the html (such as True Detective Wiki). I just found out that this won't always happen because there may not always be an 'External links' section. I was wondering if there was anyway to convert my beautiful soup code into php code using the same technique my beautiful soup code uses?
import requests, re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
def get_date(url):
r = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content)
date = soup.find_all("table", {"class": "infobox"})
for item in date:
dates = item.find_all("th")
for item2 in dates:
if item2.text == "Original run":
test2 = item2.find_next("td").text.encode("utf-8")
mysub = re.sub(r'\([^)]*\)', '', test2)
return my sub
and here is my php code currently
<?php
// Defining the basic cURL function
function curl($url) {
$ch = curl_init(); // Initialising cURL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); // Setting cURL's URL option with the $url variable passed into the function
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE); // Setting cURL's option to return the webpage data
$data = curl_exec($ch); // Executing the cURL request and assigning the returned data to the $data variable
curl_close($ch); // Closing cURL
return $data; // Returning the data from the function
}
?>
<?php
// Defining the basic scraping function
function scrape_between($data, $start, $end){
$data = stristr($data, $start); // Stripping all data from before $start
$data = substr($data, strlen($start)); // Stripping $start
$stop = stripos($data, $end); // Getting the position of the $end of the data to scrape
$data = substr($data, 0, $stop); // Stripping all data from after and including the $end of the data to scrape
return $data; // Returning the scraped data from the function
}
?>
<?php
$scraped_page = curl("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_(TV_series)"); // Downloading IMDB home page to variable $scraped_page
$scraped_data = scrape_between($scraped_page, "<table class=\"infobox vevent\" style=\"width:22em\">", "</table>"); // Scraping downloaded dara in $scraped_page for content between <title> and </title> tags
$original_run = mb_substr($scraped_data, strpos($scraped_data, "Original run")-2, strpos($scraped_data, "External links") - strpos($scraped_data, "Original run")-2);
echo $original_run;
?>

Answer 1

Have you considered simply using Wikipedia API? Autogenerated wiki markup is generally incredibly terrible to deal with and may change at any time.
Additionally, instead of trying to regex-parse HTML or something in PHP, just use the phpQuery library with composer, you can just search for the selector table.infobox.vevent.