simplehtmldom parsing script to break the data coming in plain text - php

Question

Here is my script in which I am fetching three items Medicine Name, Generic Name, Class Name. My problem here is that I am successful in fetching the Medicine name separately but the Generic Name and Class Name is coming as string. If you will run the script you will get better idea what I am actually trying to say, I want to store Generic Name and Class Name is separate columns in table.
Script
<?php
error_reporting(0);
//simple html dom file
require('simple_html_dom.php');
//target url
$html = file_get_html('http://www.drugs.com/condition/atrial-flutter.html?rest=1');
//crawl td columns
foreach($html->find('td') as $element)
{
//get drug name
$drug_name = $element->find('b');
foreach($drug_name as $drug_name)
{
echo "Drug Name:-".$drug_name;
foreach($element->find('span[class=small] a',2) as $t)
{
//get the inner HTML
$data = $t->plaintext;
echo $data;
}
echo "<br/>";
}
}
?>
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Your current code is a little bit far from what you need to do but you could utilize css selectors to get those elements easier.
Example:
$data = array();
$html = file_get_html('http://www.drugs.com/condition/atrial-flutter.html?rest=1');
foreach($html->find('tr td[1]') as $td) { // you do not need to loop each td!
// target the first td of the row
$drug_name = $td->find('a b', 0)->innertext; // get the drug name bold tag inside anchor
$other_info = $td->find('span.small[2]', 0); // get the other info
$generic_name = $other_info->find('a[1]', 0)->innertext; // get the first anchor, generic name
$children_count = count($other_info->children()); // count all of the children
$classes = array();
for($i = 1; $i < $children_count; $i++) { // since you already got the first, (in position zero) iterate all children starting from 1
$classes[] = $other_info->find('a', $i)->innertext; // push it inside another container
}
$data[] = array(
'drug_name' => $drug_name,
'generic_name' => $generic_name,
'classes' => $classes,
);
}
echo '<pre>';
print_r($data);