PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser - Combining Two Arrays - php

Question

What I am trying to do is scrape a page on Trip Advisor - I have what I need from the first page and then I do another loop to get the contents from the next page but when I try and add these details to the existing array it doesn't work for some reason.
error_reporting(E_ALL);
include_once('simple_html_dom.php');
$html = file_get_html('http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotels-g186534-c2-Glasgow_Scotland-Hotels.html');
$articles = '';
// Find all article blocks
foreach($html->find('.listing') as $hotel) {
$item['name'] = $hotel->find('.property_title', 0)->plaintext;
$item['link'] = $hotel->find('.property_title', 0)->href;
$item['rating'] = $hotel->find('.sprite-ratings', 0)->alt;
$item['rating'] = explode(' ', $item['rating']);
$item['rating'] = $item['rating'][0];
$articles[] = $item;
}
foreach($articles as $article) {
echo '<pre>';
print_r($article);
echo '</pre>';
$hotel_html = file_get_html('http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk'.$article['link'].'/');
foreach($hotel_html->find('#MAIN') as $hotel_page) {
$article['address'] = $hotel_page->find('.street-address', 0)->plaintext;
$article['extendedaddress'] = $hotel_page->find('.extended-address', 0)->plaintext;
$article['locality'] = $hotel_page->find('.locality', 0)->plaintext;
$article['country'] = $hotel_page->find('.country-name', 0)->plaintext;
echo '<pre>';
print_r($article);
echo '</pre>';
$articles[] = $article;
}
}
echo '<pre>';
print_r($articles);
echo '</pre>';
Here is all the debugging output that I get: http://pastebin.com/J0V9WbyE
URL: http://www.4playtheband.co.uk/scraper/

Answer 1

I would change
$articles = '';
to:
$articles = array();
Before foreach():
$articlesNew = array();
When iterating over the array, insert in the new array
$articlesNew[] = $article;
At the end merge the arrays
$articles = array_merge($articles, $articlesNew);
Source: http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-merge.php for more array php merge / combine.
I never tried to alter an array when already iterating through it in PHP, but if you did this with C++ collections improperly it would crash unless you treat fatal exceptions. My wild guess is that you shouldn't alter the array while iterating it. I know i would never do that. Work with another variable.