I think this is an AJAX function...

[cmattoon]

Hey all,

I'm brand new to PHP/SQL, and haven't really gotten into AJAX/JavaScript yet.

 

I have my own server, running PHP and MySQL, and one of the pages brings up information about area hospitals. (Capacity, services, helicopter pad (BOOL), helo pad lat/long, contact information, etc). I have a summary page that shows the most important information, and I would like to receive updates from another site: (hospitalstatus.emsi.org)

 

This website is operated by the region and shows the status (Open, Delay, Closed, etc) for each hospital.

 

Is there a way to collect this data on my own, without having direct access to their server? Some way to scan the HTML and gather data?

 

From "View Source", this is the code. The ID numbers are static, so I could reference them in my code

<TD CLASS="alt" NOWRAP>
<A HREF="hosp_log.cfm?id=15">AGH - Suburban Campus</A></TD>
<TD>  	<FONT COLOR="GREEN">OPEN  </TD>
<TD NOWRAP>04/04/07 08:55  </TD>

 

Thanks!

[Zane]

By using file_get_contents and a little regex.. this is possible.

 

[cmattoon]

Hm, okay.

 

Is Regex the "really complicated and seldom used because it's so difficult to understand" part of PHP that I skipped over? lol :-\

 

 

Thanks!

[Mchl]

Is Regex the "really complicated and seldom used because it's so difficult to understand" part of PHP that I skipped over? lol :-\

 

No. It's somewhat complicated and often used part of programming that you skipped over.

[cmattoon]

That was a paraphrased quote from the O'Rielly PHP book that I got...lol

 

Someone on another board helped me with this regex, but the problem is I get an "unexpected modifier: ")"" error. I've tried escaping all \\ and have done things like:

$regex = "<a....z]*)"; 
preg_match_all('$regex',$url,$result); // with and without single quotes
--Causes "Unexpected T_STRING" error..

 

New Regex: 
preg_match_all('<a\b((?!\bid\s*=|>).)*id\s*=(\d+)[^>([^<]*).*?<font\b[^>]*>([a-z]*)',$url,$result);

Any ideas??

 

I had a much simpler regex at one point, but

"echo $result[x];" (where X stands for anything I try to put in there)

would simply yield "Array" or "Array()", i forget which. I think this is a basic me-not-knowing-PHP issue, but any insight on how I messed up the array would be great too

 

Thanks again!

 

 

[Mchl]

preg_ regex pattern must start and end with a delimiter, a character like # / or % thet you don't use in regex itself

 

preg_match_all('#<a\b((?!\bid\s*=|>).)*id\s*=(\d+)[^>([^<]*).*?<font\b[^>]*>([a-z]*)#',$url,$result);

[cmattoon]

<?php
$url = file_get_contents('http://hospitalstatus.emsi.org');
preg_match_all('#<a\b((?!\bid\s*=|>).)*id\s*=(\d+)[^>([^<]*).*?<font\b[^>]*>([a-z]*)#',$url,$result);
echo $result[1];
?>

Returns the following error: Compliation failed: unmatched parentheses at offset 42 on line 3.

 

If its talking about the 42nd character, that's after the second "id" and before the "\s".

 

I don't see any unmatched parentheses?

[cmattoon]

Regex Coach is showing the ) before the <font\b part

[cags]

offest 42 means within the pattern, not on that line of code. I'm not entirely sure what your pattern does but the issue I believe is this segment here...

 

(\d+)[^>([^<]*)

 

I think that the first [ is creating a character class meaning that ^>([^ is being considered the contents of the character class. Because the opening bracket is inside the class, the closing bracket doesn't have a 'partner'. Without knowing more it's hard to say if there is a ] missing and it should be [^>]([^<]*), though that seems unlikely, or possibly the [^< is erroneous and it should be (\d+)([^<]*).