Extracting Leaderboard Data

[samtwilliams]

Morning Guys,

 

Hope you are all well,

 

I have been searching high and low for a solution for extracting leader board data from a golf website. Apologies if this may lead a little off topic but i am hoping that i can use php to solve my quandary. Each week on Europeantour.com from Thursday to Sunday they publish a live leader board on their website. I want a way to extract the leader board as it is or better still its raw data which I can then manipulate and place on a site of me own.

 

I have searched high and low for rss/xml feeds which would make life easy but haven’t had much joy.

 

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

Many Thanks

Sam

 

[gizmola]

When people want to pull something off a site that doesn't want to provide that data, often they end up resorting to using fopen() or curl.  More often than not, it's curl, because curl has all sorts of features that allow it to look to the website like a normal client.

 

Once you have the webpage data, you can parse it up.  As this is frequently a difficult and error prone task depending on the complexity of the markup, the regular expression functions are of particular benefit, because they are able to help greatly with the parsing efforts.  Expect to invest significant time looking at the markup they use, and coming up with the regex's that willl allow you to get at the particular data you want.

[samtwilliams]

Thanks Gizmola,

 

Exactly what i was looking for.