How to Parse the ajax script in DOM Parser? - php

Question

I parsing scores from http://sports.in.msn.com/football-world-cup-2014/south-africa-v-brazil/1597383
I able to parse all the attributes. But I can't able to parse the time.
I Used
$homepages = file_get_html("http://sports.in.msn.com/football-world-cup-2014/south-africa-v-brazil/1597383");
$teama = $homepages->find('span[id="clock"]');
Kindly help me

Answer 1

Since the that particular site is loading the values dynamically (thru AJAX request), you cant really parse the value upon initial load.
<span id="clock"></span> // this tends to be empty initial load
Normal scrapping:
$homepages = file_get_contents("http://sports.in.msn.com/football-world-cup-2014/south-africa-v-brazil/1597383");
$doc = new DOMDocument();
#$doc->loadHTML($homepages);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$query = $xpath->query("//span[#id='clock']");
foreach($query as $value) {
echo $value->nodeValue; // the traversal is correct, but this will be empty
}
My suggestion is instead of scraping it, you will need to have to access it thru a request also, since it is a time (of course, as the match goes on this will change and change until the game has ended). Or you can also use their request.
$url = 'http://sports.in.msn.com/liveplayajax/SOCCERMATCH/match/gsm/en-in/1597383';
$contents = file_get_contents($url);
$data = json_decode($contents, true);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($data);
echo '</pre>';
Should yield something like (a part of it actually):
[2] => Array
(
[Code] =>
[CommentId] => -1119368663
[CommentType] => manual
[Description] => FULL-TIME: South Africa 0-5 Brazil.
[Min] => 90'
[MinExtra] => (+3)
[View] =>
[ViewHint] =>
[ViewIndex] => 0
[EditKey] =>
[TrackingValues] =>
[AopValue] =>
)
You should get the 90' by using foreach. Consider this example:
foreach($data['Commentary']['CommentaryItems'] as $key => $value) {
if(stripos($value['Description'], 'FULL-TIME') !== false) {
echo $value['Min'];
break;
}
}
Should print: 90'