Extract Value from HTML using PHP - php

Question

I'm retrieving a HTML page using cURL. The html page has a table like this.
<table class="table2" style="width:85%; text-align:center">
<tr>
<th>Refference ID</th>
<th>Transaction No</th>
<th>Type</th>
<th>Operator</th>
<th>Amount</th>
<th>Slot</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>130717919020ffqClE0nRaspoB</td>
<td>8801458920369</td>
<td>Purchase</td>
<td>Visa</td>
<td>50</td>
<td>20130717091902413</td>
</tr>
</table>
This is the only table in that HTML page. I need to extract Refference ID & Slot using PHP.
But no idea how that can be done.
EDIT:
This one helped me a lot.

Answer 1

A regex based solution like the accepted answer is not the right way to extract information from HTML documents.
Use a DOMDocument based solution like this instead:
$str = '<table class="table2" style="width:85%; text-align:center">
<tr>
<th>Refference ID</th>
...
<th>Slot</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>130717919020ffqClE0nRaspoB</td>
...
<td>20130717091902413</td>
</tr>
</table>';
// Create a document out of the string. Initialize XPath
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($str);
$selector = new DOMXPath($doc);
// Query the values in a stable and easy to maintain way using XPath
$refResult = $selector->query('//table[#class="table2"]/tr[2]/td[1]');
$slotResult = $selector->query('//table[#class="table2"]/tr[2]/td[6]');
// Check if the data was found
if($refResult->length !== 1 || $slotResult->length !== 1) {
die("Data is corrupted");
}
// XPath->query always returns a node set, even if
// this contains only a single value.
$refId = $refResult->item(0)->nodeValue;
$slot = $slotResult->item(0)->nodeValue;
echo "RefId: $refId, Slot: $slot", PHP_EOL;

Answer 2

$str = '<table class="table2" style="width:85%; text-align:center">
<tr>
<th>Refference ID</th>
<th>Transaction No</th>
<th>Type</th>
<th>Operator</th>
<th>Amount</th>
<th>Slot</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>130717919020ffqClE0nRaspoB</td>
<td>8801458920369</td>
<td>Purchase</td>
<td>Visa</td>
<td>50</td>
<td>20130717091902413</td>
</tr>
</table>';
preg_match_all('/<td>([^<]*)<\/td>/', $str, $m);
$reference_id = $m[1][0];
$slot = $m[1][5];