Grabbing content from URL

[Canman2005]

Is it possible to supply a URL of an external site in PHP and grab whatever is held between two defined tags.

 

For example, if you wanted to grab news from a website, then providing the URL and HTML tags the news you want to grab in contained within and then PHP would pull through each result on the page?

 

Is this possible?

[DarkWater]

It's absolutely possible.  I'd suggest checking out the cURL library and regular expressions.

[Maq]

Yes cURL is very popular but depending on you situation you may want to use file_get_contents() instead.

[DarkWater]

That works too, but cURL is faster.  And if you need to POST any data or log in or use cookies for the site, you need cURL.  file_get_contents() is certainly easier though.

[Canman2005]

So how do you define what tags to grab between on file_get_contents()? I have had a look around and can see how to grab so many bytes of a page or a full page but not defining what tags

[Maq]

You need to see what the format of the page is and use Regex.  There are many examples on phpfreaks and millions on the web.

[xtopolis]

DarkWater wrote a tutorial on reg ex with PHP.  It even shows a grabbing-between-tags example.

[RussellReal]

regex is slow

 

use strpos with substr

 

example:

 

<?php
  $d = file_get_contents("http://theWebsite.com/file.php");
  $tag = "<h1>";
  $s = strpos($d,$tag) + strlen($tag);
  $e = strpos($d,"</".substr($tag,1),$s);
  $content = substr($d,$s,$e - $s);
?>