Get text from element on external page

[marklarah]

I want to get the value of an element (a span in this case), and display it on my page. Told to do this in javascript, all I have come up with is

var target = '';
target.setAttribute( "src", "urlhere" ); 
target = document.getElementsByTagName( "span" )[3].value; 

 

It obviously doesn't work. The element doesn't actually have an ID, just it's class is unique. So how would I call the text from just the element on the page? I don't know where to start.

 

Thanks...

[sdi126]

finding elements by className is not natively supported in all major browsers :-X but I have used this javascript function before for what you are needing to do.

 

function getElementsByClassName(className, tag, elm){
var testClass = new RegExp("(^|\\s)" + className + "(\\s|$)");
var tag = tag || "*";
var elm = elm || document;
var elements = (tag == "*" && elm.all)? elm.all : elm.getElementsByTagName(tag);
var returnElements = [];
var current;
var length = elements.length;
for(var i=0; i<length; i++){
	current = elements[i];
	if(testClass.test(current.className)){
		returnElements.push(current);
	}
}
return returnElements;
}

 

----->http://www.robertnyman.com/2005/11/07/the-ultimate-getelementsbyclassname/

 

[marklarah]

Hmmm....yes, but I also need to be able to do this function on an external page

[marklarah]

Also, I've been using this that I found on the internet

var allHTMLTags = new Array();
function getElementByClass(theClass) {
//Create Array of All HTML Tags
var allHTMLTags=document.getElementsByTagName(”*”);
//Loop through all tags using a for loop
for (i=0; i<allHTMLTags.length; i++) {
//Get all tags with the specified class name.
if (allHTMLTags[i].className==theClass) {
//Place any code you want to apply to all
//pages with the class specified.
//In this example is to “display:none;” them
//Making them all dissapear on the page.
allHTMLTags[i].style.display=’none’;
}
}
}

 

 

[marklarah]

bump

[marklarah]

yah nobody cares about this board.

[marklarah]

bumpity

[marklarah]

I'll give y'all a cookie?

[RichardRotterdam]

Hmmm....yes, but I also need to be able to do this function on an external page

Depends if that external page is on a different domain javascript can't be cross domain. Even if it is on the same server PHP is probably better to use. You can use cURL or just parse the page to a string. Then you could do a regex to fetch the element you want. Or use DOM

[marklarah]

uh...

[haku]

Is the page on a different domain?

[marklarah]

Yes

[Adam]

... Then reading the contents of that page is beyond JavaScript. You'll need to look into using a server-side programming language like PHP; more specifically curl or one of the file functions.

 

Adam

[marklarah]

I know I can read external pages in PHP, but I need to be able to pick out certain elements.

[Adam]

Regular expressions...

 

Adam

[RichardRotterdam]

Or parse it using the DOMdocument class domdocument