Using PHP to grab data from another webpage

[adam_]

Hi

I have a PHP driven CMS (self coded), for a group of users of a particular piece of software. The software writes information about the user (eg time logged in) etc to a website that is out of my control.

I want to be able to grab this data (which is displayed publically on a website) and put it into my MySql database once a week, as a cron job.

I can use cron and mysql fine, the issue is I have no idea how to go about grabbing data from another website.

I consider myself in the intermediate/semi-adavanced level with PHP, so a link to a tutorial would be great, i dont need the code making for me.

As the software is pre-release, i do not want to post it, or the website in question so the forum, but a generic response on the subject would be appreciated.

Thanks

Adam_

[Jocka]

the file command would come in handy here. If the information is posted on the page as you say then you can use file to read the page and sort it as it needs to be.

[Psycho]

Just because data is publicly available does not mean it is legal to copy it. I will leave it to you to verify wether that site allows you to do that or not.

What you are wanting to do is called screen scraping. Do a search for "PHP .creen scraping". There are free classes you can download to do all the heavy lifting.

[keeB]

Or, you can use the web wrapper for fopen() to retrieve the HTML and parse the relevant parts.

http://us2.php.net/fopen

Good luck, let me know if you have any issues.