How can I parse a very simple Table using PHP - php

Question

Good day dear community!
I need to build a function which parses the content of a very simple Table
(with some labels and values) see the url below. I have used various ways to parse html sources. But this one is is a bit tricky! See the target i want to parse - it has some invaild markup:
The target: http://www.schulministerium.nrw.de/BP/SchuleSuchen?action=644.0013008534253&SchulAdresseMapDO=194190
Well i tried it with this one
<?php
require_once('config.php'); // call config.php for db connection
$filename = "url.txt"; // Include the txt file which have urls
$each_line = file($filename);
foreach($each_line as $line_num => $line)
{
$line = trim($line);
$content = file_get_contents($line);
//echo ($content)."<br>";
$pattern = '/<td>(.*?)<\/td>/si';
preg_match_all($pattern,$content,$matches);
foreach ($matches[1] as $match) {
$match = strip_tags($match);
$match = trim($match);
//var_dump($match);
$sql = mysqli_query("insert into tablename(contents) values ('$match')");
//echo $match;
}
}
?>
Well - see the regex in line 7-11: it does not match!
Conclusio: i have to rework the parser-part of this script. I need to parse someway different - since the parsercode does not match exactly what is aimed. It is aimed to get back the results of the table.
Can anybody help me here to get a better regex - or a better way to parse this site ...
Any and all help will be greatly apprecaited.
regards
zero

Answer 1

You could use tear the table apart using
preg_split('/<td width="73%"> /', $str, -1); (note; i did not bother escaping characters)
You'll want to drop the first entry. Now you can use stripos and substr to cut away everything after the .
This is a basic setup! You will have to fine-tune it quite a bit, but I hope this gives you an idea of what would be my approach.

Answer 2

Regex does not always provide perfect result. Using any HTML parser is a good idea. There are many HTML parsers as described in Gordon's Answer.
I have used Simple HTML DOM Parser in past and it worked for me.
For Example:
// Create DOM from URL or file
$html = file_get_html('http://www.example.com/');
// Find all <td> in <table> which class=hello
$es = $html->find('table.hello td');
// Find all td tags with attribite align=center in table tags
$es = $html->find('table td[align=center]');