Get content from a url using php - php

Question

I want to get the dynamic contents from a particular url:
I have used the code
echo $content=file_get_contents('http://www.punoftheday.com/cgi-bin/arandompun.pl');
I am getting following results:
document.write('"Bakers have a great knead to make bread."
') document.write('© 1996-2007 Pun of the Day.com
')
How can i get the string Bakers have a great knead to make bread.
Only string inside first document.write will change, other code will remain constant
Regards,
Pankaj

Answer 1

You are fetching a JavaScript snippet that is supposed to be built in directly into the document, not queried by a script. The code inside is JavaScript.
You could pull out the code using a regular expression, but I would advise against it. First, it's probably not legal to do. Second, the format of the data they serve can change any time, breaking your script.
I think you should take at their RSS feed. You can parse that programmatically way easier than the JavaScript.
Check out this question on how to do that: Best way to parse RSS/Atom feeds with PHP

Answer 2

1) several local methods
<?php
echo readfile("http://example.com/"); //needs "Allow_url_include" enabled
echo include("http://example.com/"); //needs "Allow_url_include" enabled
echo file_get_contents("http://example.com/");
echo stream_get_contents(fopen('http://example.com/', "rb")); //you may use "r" instead of "rb" //needs "Allow_url_fopen" enabled
?>
2) Better Way is CURL:
echo get_remote_data('http://example.com'); // GET request
echo get_remote_data('http://example.com', "var2=something&var3=blabla" ); // POST request
//============= https://github.com/tazotodua/useful-php-scripts/ ===========
function get_remote_data($url, $post_paramtrs=false) { $c = curl_init();curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, $url);curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); if($post_paramtrs){curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_POST,TRUE); curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "var1=bla&".$post_paramtrs );} curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST,false);curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,false);curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0"); curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_COOKIE, 'CookieName1=Value;'); curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10); $follow_allowed= ( ini_get('open_basedir') || ini_get('safe_mode')) ? false:true; if ($follow_allowed){curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);}curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 9);curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_REFERER, $url);curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60);curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true); curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_ENCODING, 'gzip,deflate');$data=curl_exec($c);$status=curl_getinfo($c);curl_close($c);preg_match('/(http(|s)):\/\/(.*?)\/(.*\/|)/si', $status['url'],$link);$data=preg_replace('/(src|href|action)=(\'|\")((?!(http|https|javascript:|\/\/|\/)).*?)(\'|\")/si','$1=$2'.$link[0].'$3$4$5', $data);$data=preg_replace('/(src|href|action)=(\'|\")((?!(http|https|javascript:|\/\/)).*?)(\'|\")/si','$1=$2'.$link[1].'://'.$link[3].'$3$4$5', $data);if($status['http_code']==200) {return $data;} elseif($status['http_code']==301 || $status['http_code']==302) { if (!$follow_allowed){if(empty($redirURL)){if(!empty($status['redirect_url'])){$redirURL=$status['redirect_url'];}} if(empty($redirURL)){preg_match('/(Location:|URI:)(.*?)(\r|\n)/si', $data, $m);if (!empty($m[2])){ $redirURL=$m[2]; } } if(empty($redirURL)){preg_match('/href\=\"(.*?)\"(.*?)here\<\/a\>/si',$data,$m); if (!empty($m[1])){ $redirURL=$m[1]; } } if(!empty($redirURL)){$t=debug_backtrace(); return call_user_func( $t[0]["function"], trim($redirURL), $post_paramtrs);}}} return "ERRORCODE22 with $url!!<br/>Last status codes<b/>:".json_encode($status)."<br/><br/>Last data got<br/>:$data";}
NOTICE: It automatically handles FOLLOWLOCATION problem + Remote urls are automatically re-corrected! ( src="./imageblabla.png" --------> src="http://example.com/path/imageblabla.png" )
p.s.on GNU/Linux distro servers, you might need to install the php5-curl package to use it.

Answer 3

Pekka's answer is probably the best way of doing this. But anyway here's the regex you might want to use in case you find yourself doing something like this, and can't rely on RSS feeds etc.
document\.write\(' // start tag
([^)]*) // the data to match
'\) // end tag
EDIT for example:
<?php
$subject = "document.write('"Paying for college is often a matter of in-tuition."<br />')\ndocument.write('<i>© 1996-2007 <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://www.punoftheday.com\">Pun of the Day.com</a></i><br />')";
$pattern = "/document\.write\('([^)]*)'\)/";
preg_match($pattern, $subject, $matches);
print_r($matches);
?>