PHP DOM grabbing a specific subset of information - php

Question

The webpage in question is http://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/q?db=pat&pub=20060030630
Now, let's just say I want to capture the Assignees in the first assignment. The relevant code there looks like
<div class="t3">Assignee:</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td><td>
<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tbody valign="top">
<tr>
<td>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<div class="p1">
LEAR CORPORATION
</div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span class="p1">21557 TELEGRAPH ROAD</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span class="p1">SOUTHFIELD, MICHIGAN 48034</span></td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
I could I suppose use xpath and grab everything out of spans with class p1, except that thing is used all throughout the page for basically everything, same for the div class that lear corporation is in.
So is there a way for me to just read "Assignees" and then grab just the information relevant to it?
I figure if I can understand how to do that, then I can extrapolate from that and figure out how to grab any specific data on the page that I want, i.e. grabbing the conveyance data on any particular assignment.
But if say, I were just to grab all the data on the page (reel/frame, conveyance, assignors, assignee, correspondent for every assignment, and the header information about the patent itself), might that be easier to do than trying to grab each individual piece of information?

Answer 1

There is no clear way to do it since we have no designation in the DOM where this information is.. It's very arbitrary.
I would recommend using some math to figure out the pattern of where in the DOM the Assignee resides.
For example, we know that for every class of p1, the assignee value is position 16, and a new Assignment occurs every 23rd position. Using a loop you could figure it out.
This should get you started at the very least.
$Site = file_get_contents('http://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/q?db=pat&pub=20060030630');
$Dom = new DomDocument();
$Dom->loadHTML($Site);
$Finder = new DomXPath($Dom);
$Nodes = $Finder->query("//*[contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(#class), ' '), ' p1 ')]");
$position = 0;
foreach($Nodes as $node) {
if(($position % 16) == 0 && $position > 0) {
var_dump($node->nodeValue);
break;
}
$position++;
}