Get information from a website (i.e. search engine)

[contra10]

Hello, this is more of a question since I don't know where to begin. I want to use a spider to search a website and gather information and then organize it into a table the specific information from the site that I need. For example lets say I wanted to search a sports website and only get the details of the teams and their scores and then place it into my database without getting other information of that website?

[trq]

You haven't asked a question.

[contra10]

sorry, I guess my question is: How do I create a spider that searches a website extracts links, and certain keywords, then organizes it so that it will be saved in a database?

[trq]

You will need to fetch the file (you can use file_get_contents for this), parse it using either regex (see preg_match) or the dom extension (see dom), then save your results to a database.

[contra10]

I don't really understand preg_match when using it, although i understand the concept

 

i did this as a trial

 

<?php 

$html = file_get_contents('http://www.google.com/');

preg_match('google', "$html", $matches);

    preg_match_all("<a href", $html, $match);

foreach($match[1] as $val);  

{        

echo $val."<br>";   
    } 

?>

 

i don't really get how to get the actual a href links from all the links on the page

[xyph]

This is a very bad starter project.

 

I'd suggest buying a good PHP and Regular Expression book. By the time you get through both, scraping a page should be easy enough.