PHP cURL

[Vivid Lust]

Could anyone give me an example of say, getting the <title> value of Google with PHP cURL?

 

Thanks,

 

Jake.

[supermerc]

first you have to get the the site using curl

 

<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.google.com');
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
?>

 

That will go to google, $result is your variable that contains the google, now what you need to do is use preg_match to find whatever you want.

[Vivid Lust]

Thanks!

 

Say this was on a page:

 

<div class="foo">bar</div>

 

How would I get everything within the div?? so targetting the class foo

 

Thanks

[supermerc]

limiters and delimiters

[thebadbad]

supermerc almost got it; he forgot to make cURL return the site's source code instead of outputting it. Do it by adding this line after the line with curl_setopt():

 

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

And you could run into problems with certain sites checking the user agent string to disallow scripts from reading their content. You solve that by adding this option (just after the one above):

 

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; da; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10');

And here's an example on matching specific content with regular expressions:

 

preg_match('~<div class="foo">(.*)</div>~is', $result, $matches);
//$matches[1] now contains the content of the div
//note that a nested div will stop the match

preg_match() stops after the first match. If you want to match multiple parts of the content, have a look at preg_match_all().

[supermerc]

supermerc almost got it; he forgot to make cURL return the site's source code instead of outputting it. Do it by adding this line after the line with curl_setopt():

 

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

And you could run into problems with certain sites checking the user agent string to disallow scripts from reading their content. You solve that by adding this option (just after the one above):

 

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; da; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10');

And here's an example on matching specific content with regular expressions:

 

preg_match('~<div class="foo">(.*)</div>~is', $result, $matches);
//$matches[1] now contains the content of the div
//note that a nested div will stop the match

preg_match() stops after the first match. If you want to match multiple parts of the content, have a look at preg_match_all().

 

Oups