Scraping using php - preg_match_all

Question

Trying to get the value of Internet Data Volume Balance - the script should echo 146.30mb

New to all these, having a look at all the tutorials.

How can this be done?

<tr >
    <td bgcolor="#F8F8F8"><div align="left"><B><FONT class="tplus_text">Account Status</FONT></B></div></td>
    <td bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div align="left"><FONT class="tplus_text">You exceeded your allowed credit.</FONT></div></td>
</tr> 

<tr >
    <td bgcolor="#F8F8F8"><div align="left"><B><FONT class="tplus_text">Period Free Time Remaining</FONT></B></div></td>
    <td bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div align="left"><FONT class="tplus_text">0:00:00 hours</FONT></div></td>
</tr> 

<tr >
    <td bgcolor="#F8F8F8"><div align="left"><B><FONT class="tplus_text">Internet Data Volume Balance</FONT></B></div></td>
    <td bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div align="left"><FONT class="tplus_text" style="text-transform:none;">146.30 MB</FONT></div></td>
</tr>

I think you'll find that while you **can** use regex to parse HTML, it's **not usually advisable**. `DOM` or `SimpleXML` will likely be much better options in this situation. — , Apr 24 '12 at 12:49
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags SimplHTMLDom Parser is exactly what the name suggests a simple way to parse html! http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/, there are quite a few other html parsing options for php too. — dm03514, Apr 24 '12 at 12:51

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

1

PHP can interact with the DOM just like JavaScript can. This is vastly superior to parsing the markup, as most people will tell you is the wrong approach anyway:

Loading from an HTML File

// Start by creating a new document
$doc = new DOMDocument();
// I've loaded the table into an external file, and am loading it into the $doc
$doc->loadHTMLFile( 'htmlpage.html' );
// Since you have six table cells, I'm calling up all of them
$cells = $doc->getElementsByTagName("td");
// I'm grabbing the sixth cell's textContent property
echo $cells->item(5)->textContent;

This code will output "146.30 MB" to the screen.

Loading from a String

If you have the HTML stored within a string, you can load that into your document as well. We'll change the method used to load the file, into the method used to load from a string:

$str = "<table><tr><td>Foo</td></tr>...</table>";
$doc->loadHTML( $str );

We would then proceed with the same code as above to select the cells, and show their textContent in the output.

Check out the DOMDocument Class.

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

1
1

answered Apr 24 '12 at 13:03

Sampson

265,109
74
539
565

I am using curl to get the content of the page. it is a protected page. can i load the output from curl directly into loadHTMLFile ? – Parvesh Apr 24 '12 at 13:19
@devilived Yes, you can load the HTML from a string too. Use `$doc->loadHTML($str)` for that, where `$str` is your HTML. – Sampson Apr 24 '12 at 13:24

It works, thanks. But i am getting a few warnings :

Warning: DOMDocument::loadHTML() [domdocument.loadhtml]: htmlParseEntityRef: expecting ';' in Entity, line: 295 in /home/premiu59/public_html/phpcurl/scraper.php on line 27

Warning: DOMDocument::loadHTML() [domdocument.loadhtml]: Opening and ending tag mismatch: tr and table in Entity, line: 484 in /home/premiu59/public_html/phpcurl/scraper.php on line 27
146.30 MB

– Parvesh Apr 24 '12 at 13:35

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 24 '12 at 13:09

1

If you were willing to or have already installed phpQuery, you can use that.

phpQuery::newDocumentFileHTML('htmlpage.html');
echo pq('td:eq(6)')->text();

answered Apr 24 '12 at 13:09

Explosion Pills

188,624
52
326
405

Scraping using php - preg_match_all

2 Answers2

Loading from an HTML File

Loading from a String