I have a series of select boxes that I'd like to get data from, essentially turning them into an array. What's the most efficient way to do this? Right now I'm thinking....
$html = file_get_contents('http://www.domain.com');
preg_match_all("/name\=\'subscription\[division_id\]\' style\=\'width: 170px;\'>(.+?)<\/select>/is", $html, $matches);
Then I was thinking of running other code to take the option tags into an array, but this seems it might be a little unnecessarily intensive
If you are scraping for whatever reason, you could probably parse the page's html with php's DOMXPath commands. I can't write out all the code, but you can get started with:
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$select_values = $xpath->evaluate("/html/body//option");
Then you run everything through a loop getting the contents of the options. Anyway, with something like this you can avoid all the nonsense with regex.
Related
I'm working on some system for a few hours now and this little thing is too much for me to think logically about at the moment.
Normally I would wait a few hours but this is a last minute job and I need to finish this.
Here's my problem:
I have an XML file that gets posted to my PHP file, the PHP file inserts certain data into a DB, but some XML nodes have the same name:
<accessoires>
<accessoire>value1</accessoire>
<accessoire>value2</accessoire>
<accessoire>value3</accessoire>
</accessoires>
Now I want to get a var $acclist which contains all values seperated by a comma:
value1,value2,value3,
I bet the solution to this is very easy but I'm at the known point where even the easiest piece of code becomes a hassle. And googling only comes up with nodes that in some way have their own identifiers.
Could someone help me out please?
You can try simplexml_load_string to parse the html then call implode on the node after casting to an array.
NOTE This code was tested in php 5.4.6 and behaves as expected.
<?php
$xml = '<accessoires>
<accessoire>value1</accessoire>
<accessoire>value2</accessoire>
<accessoire>value3</accessoire>
</accessoires>';
$dat = simplexml_load_string($xml);
echo implode(",",(array)$dat->accessoire);
For 5.3.x I had to change to
$xml = '<accessoires>
<accessoire>value1</accessoire>
<accessoire>value2</accessoire>
<accessoire>value3</accessoire>
</accessoires>';
$dat = simplexml_load_string($xml);
$dat = (array)$dat;
echo implode(",",$dat["accessoire"]);
You do this by taking a library that is able to parse and process XML, for example with SimpleXML:
implode(',', iterator_to_array($accessoires->accessoire, FALSE));
The key part here is to use iterator_to_array() as SimpleXML offers the same-named child-elements here as an iterator. Otherwise $accessoires->accessoire gives you auto-magically only the first element (if any).
I have the following PHP. Basically, I'm getting similar data from multiple pages of a website (the current number of homeruns from a website that has a bunch of baseball player profiles). The JSON that I'm bringing in has all of the URLs to all of the different profiles that I'm looking to grab from, and so I need PHP to run through the URLs and grab the data. However, the following PHP only gets the info from the very first URL. I'm probably making a stupid mistake. Can anyone see why it's not going through all the URLs?
include('simple_html_dom.php');
$json = file_get_contents("http://example.com/homeruns.json");
$elements = json_decode($json);
foreach ($elements as $element){
$html = new simple_html_dom();
$html->load_file($element->profileurl);
$currenthomeruns = $html->find('.homeruns .current',0);
echo $element->name, " currently has the following number of homeruns: ", strip_tags($currenthomeruns);
return $html;
}
Wait... You are using return $html. Why? Return is going to break out of your function, thus stopping your foreach.
If you are indeed trying to get the $html out of your function for ALL of the elements, you should push each $html into an array and then return that array after the loop.
Because you return. return leaves the current method, function, or script, which includes every loop. With PHP5.5 you can use yield to let the function behaves like an generator, but this is definitely out of scope for now.
Unless your braces are off, you return at the very end of the loop so the loop will never iterate.
This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
PHP HTML DomDocument getElementById problems
I'm trying to extract info from Google searches in PHP and find that I can read the search urls without problem, but getting anything out of them is a whole different issue. After reading numerous posts, and applicable PHP docs, I came up with the following
// get large panoramas of montana
$url = 'http://www.google.com/search?q=montana+panorama&tbm=isch&biw=1408&bih=409';
$html = file_get_contents($url);
// was getting tons of "entity parse" errors, so added
$html = htmlentities($html, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8', true); // tried false as well
$doc = new DOMDocument();
//$doc->strictErrorChecking = false; // tried both true and false here, same result
$result = $doc->loadHTML($html);
//echo $doc->saveHTML(); this shows that the tags I'm looking for are in fact in $doc
if ($result === true)
{
var_dump($result); // prints 'true'
$tags = $doc->getElementById('center_col');
$tags = $doc->getElementsByTagName('td');
var_dump($tags); // previous 2 lines both print NULL
}
I've verified that the ids and tags I'm looking for are in the html by error_log($html) and in the parsed doc with $doc->SaveHTNL(). Anyone see what I'm doing wrong?
Edit:
Thanks all for the help, but I've hit a wall with DOMDocument. Nothing in any of the docs, or other threads, works with Google image queries. Here's what I tried:
I looked at the #Jon link tried all the suggestions there, looked at the getElementByID docs and read all the comments there as well. Still getting empty result sets. Better than NULL, but not much.
I tried the xpath trick:
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$ccol = $xpath->query("//*[#id='center_col']");
Same result, an empty set.
I did a error_log($html) directly after the file read and the document has a doctype "" so it's not that.
I also see there that user "carl2088" says "From my experience, getElementById seem to work fine without any setups if you have loaded a HTML document". Not in the case of Google image queries, it would appear.
In desperation, I tried
echo count(explode('center_col', $html))
to see if for some strange reason it disappears after the initial error_log($html). It's definitely there, the string is split into 4 chunks.
I checked my version of PHP (5.3.15) complied Aug. 25 2012, so it's not a version too old to support getElementByID.
Before yesterday, I had been using an extremely ugly series of "explodes" to get the info, and while it's horrid code, it took 45 minutes to write and it works.
I'd really like to ditch my "explode" hack, but 5 hours to achieve nothing vs 45 minutes to get something that works, makes it really difficult to do things the right way.
If anyone else with experience using DOMDocument has some additional tricks I could try, it would be much appreciated.
are you using the the javascript getElementById and getElementsByTagName if yes than this is the problem
$tags = $doc->getElementById('center_col');
$tags = $doc->getElementsByTagName('td');
You will need to validate your document with DOMDocument->validate() or DOMDocument->validateOnParse before using function $doc->getElementById('center_col');
$doc->validateOnParse = true;
$doc->loadHTML($html);
stackoverflow: getelementbyid-problem
http://php.net/manual/de/domdocument.getelementbyid.php
it's in the question #Jon post in his comment!
After using curl i've got from an external page i've got all source code with something like this (the part i'm interested)
(page...)<td valign='top' class='rdBot' align='center'><img src="/images/buy_tickets.gif" border="0" alt="T"></td> (page...)
So i'm using preg_match_all, i want to get only "buy_tickets.gif"
$pattern_before = "<td valign='top' class='rdBot' align='center'>";
$pattern_after = "</td>";
$pattern = '#'.$pattern_before.'(.*?)'.$pattern_after.'#si';
preg_match_all($pattern, $buffer, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);
Everything fine up to now... but the problem it's becase sometimes that external pages changes and the image i'm looking for it's inside a link
(page...)<td valign='top' class='rdBot' align='center'><img src="/images/buy_tickets.gif" border="0" alt="T"></td> (page...)
and i dunno how to get always my code to work (not just when the image gets no link)
hope u understand
thanks in advance
Don't use regex to parse HTML, Use PHP's DOM Extension. Try this:
$doc = new DOMDocument;
#$doc->loadHTMLFile( 'http://ventas.entradasmonumental.com/eventperformances.asp?evt=18' ); // Using the # operator to hide parse errors
$xpath = new DOMXPath( $doc );
$img = $xpath->query( '//td[#class="BrdBot"][#align="center"][1]//img[1]')->item( 0 ); // Xpath->query returns a 'DOMNodeList', get the first item which is a 'DOMElement' (or null)
$imgSrc = $img->getAttribute( 'src' );
$imgSrcInfo = pathInfo( $imgSrc );
$imgFilename = $imgSrcInfo['basename']; // All you need
You're going to get lots of advice not to use regex for pulling stuff out of HTML code.
There are times when it's appropriate to use regex for this kind of thing, and I don't always agree with the somewhat rigid advice given on the subject here (and elsewhere). However in this case, I would say that regex is not the appropriate solution for you.
The problem with using regex for searching for things in HTML code is exactly the problem you've encountered -- HTML code can vary wildly, making any regex virtually impossible to get right.
It is just about possible to write a regex for your situation, but it will be an insanely complex regex, and very brittle -- ie prone to failing if the HTML code is even slightly outside the parameters you expect.
Contrast this with the recommended solution, which is to use a DOM parser. Load the HTML code into a DOM parser, and you will immediately have an object structure which you can query for individual elements and attributes.
The details you've given make it almost a no-brainer to go with this rather than a regex.
PHP has a built-in DOM parser, which you can call as follows:
$mydom = new DOMDocument;
$mydom->loadHTMLFile("http://....");
You can then use XPath to search the DOM for your specific element or attribute that you want:
$myxpath = new DOMXPath($mydom);
$myattr = $xpath->query("//td[#class="rdbot"]//img[0]#src");
Hope that helps.
function GetFilename($file) {
$filename = substr($file, strrpos($file,'/')+1,strlen($file)-strrpos($file,'/'));
return $filename;
}
echo GetFilename('/images/buy_tickets.gif');
This will output buy_tickets.gif
Do you only need images inside of the "td" tags?
$regex='/<img src="\/images\/([^"]*)"[^>]*>/im';
edit:
to grab the specific image this should work:
$regex='/<td valign=\'top\' class=\'rdBot\' align=\'center\'>.*src="\/images\/([^"]*)".*<\/td>/
Parsing HTML with Regex is not recommended, as has been mentioned by several posters.
However, if the path of your images always follows the pattern src="/images/name.gif", you can easily extract it in Regex:
$pattern = <<<EOD
#src\s*=\s*['"]/images/(.*?)["']#
EOD;
If you are sure that the images always follow the path "/images/name.ext" and that you don't care where the image link is located in the page, this will do the job. If you have more detailed requirements (such matching only within a specific class), forget Regex, it's not the right tool for the job.
I just read in your comments that you need to match within a specific tag. Use a parser, it will save you untold headaches.
If you still want to go through regex, try this:
\(?<=<td .*?class\s*=\s*['"]rdBot['"][^<>]*?>.*?)(?<!</td>.*)<img [^<>]*src\s*=\s*["']/images/(.*?)["']\i
This should work. It does work in C#, I am not totally sure about php's brand of regex.
I am trying to create a simple alert app for some friends.
Basically i want to be able to extract data "price" and "stock availability" from a webpage like the folowing two:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=5
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9279
I have made the alert via e-mail and sms part but now i want to be able to get the quantity and price out of the webpages (those 2 or any other ones) so that i can compare the price and quantity available and alert us to make an order if a product is between some thresholds.
I have tried some regex (found on some tutorials, but i an way too n00b for this) but haven't managed to get this working, any good tips or examples?
$content = file_get_contents('http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9279');
preg_match('#<tr><th>(.*)</th> <td><b>price</b></td></tr>#', $content, $match);
$price = $match[1];
preg_match('#<input type="hidden" name="quantity_on_hand" value="(.*?)">#', $content, $match);
$in_stock = $match[1];
echo "Price: $price - Availability: $in_stock\n";
It's called screen scraping, in case you need to google for it.
I would suggest that you use a dom parser and xpath expressions instead. Feed the HTML through HtmlTidy first, to ensure that it's valid markup.
For example:
$html = file_get_contents("http://www.example.com");
$html = tidy_repair_string($html);
$doc = new DomDocument();
$doc->loadHtml($html);
$xpath = new DomXPath($doc);
// Now query the document:
foreach ($xpath->query('//table[#class="pricing"]/th') as $node) {
echo $node, "\n";
}
What ever you do: Don't use regular expressions to parse HTML or bad things will happen. Use a parser instead.
1st, asking this question goes too into details. 2nd, extracting data from a website might not be legitimate. However, I have hints:
Use Firebug or Chrome/Safari Inspector to explore the HTML content and pattern of interesting information
Test your RegEx to see if the match. You may need do it many times (multi-pass parsing/extraction)
Write a client via cURL or even much simpler, use file_get_contents (NOTE that some hosting disable loading URLs with file_get_contents)
For me, I'd better use Tidy to convert to valid XHTML and then use XPath to extract data, instead of RegEx. Why? Because XHTML is not regular and XPath is very flexible. You can learn XSLT to transform.
Good luck!
You are probably best off loading the HTML code into a DOM parser like this one and searching for the "pricing" table. However, any kind of scraping you do can break whenever they change their page layout, and is probably illegal without their consent.
The best way, though, would be to talk to the people who run the site, and see whether they have alternative, more reliable forms of data delivery (Web services, RSS, or database exports come to mind).
The simplest method to extract data from Website. I've analysed that my all data is covered within <h3> tag only, so I've prepared this one.
<?php
include(‘simple_html_dom.php’);
// Create DOM from URL, paste your destined web url in $page
$page = ‘http://facebook4free.com/category/facebookstatus/amazing-facebook-status/’;
$html = new simple_html_dom();
//Within $html your webpage will be loaded for further operation
$html->load_file($page);
// Find all links
$links = array();
//Within find() function, I have written h3 so it will simply fetch the content from <h3> tag only. Change as per your requirement.
foreach($html->find(‘h3′) as $element)
{
$links[] = $element;
}
reset($links);
//$out will be having each of HTML element content you searching for, within that web page
foreach ($links as $out)
{
echo $out;
}
?>