Retrieving a single line from a html table from another website? - php

Question

I am try to learn curl usage, but I do not understand how it works fully yet. How can I use curl (or other functions) to access on one (the top) data entry of a table. So far I am only able to retrieve the entire website. How can I only echo the whole table and specifically the first entry. My code is:
<?php
$ch = curl_init("http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>

Answer 1

Using curl is a good start, but its not going to be enough, as hanky suggested, you need to also use DOMDocument and also you can include DOMXpath.
Sample Code:
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$html = curl_exec($ch); // the whole document (in string) goes in here
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html); // load it
libxml_clear_errors();
$xpath = new DOMXpath($dom);
// point it to the particular table
// table with a class named 'reference', second row (first data), get the td
$table_row = $xpath->query('//table[#class="reference"]/tr[2]/td');
foreach($table_row as $td) {
echo $td->nodeValue . ' ';
}
Should output:
Jill Smith 50