How to 'scrape' content from a page's source? [closed]

Question

I have this code which gets the HTML source of a page:

$page = file_get_contents('http://example.com/page.html');
$page = htmlentities($page);

I want to scrape some content from it. For example, say the page's source contains this:

<strong>technorati.com</strong><br />
Connection failed<br /><br />Pinging <strong>icerocket.com</strong><br />
Connection failed<br /><br />Pinging <strong>weblogs.com</strong><br />
Done<br /><br />Pinging <strong>newsgator.com</strong><br />
Done<br /><br />Pinging <strong>blo.gs</strong><br />
Done<br /><br />Pinging <strong>feedburner.com</strong><br />
Done<br /><br />Pinging <strong>blogstreet.com</strong><br />
Done<br /><br />Pinging <strong>my.yahoo.com</strong><br />
Connection failed<br /><br />Pinging <strong>moreover.com</strong><br />
Connection failed<br /><br />Pinging <strong>newsisfree.com</strong><br />
Done<br />

Is there a way I could scrape this from the source and store it in a variable, so it'll look like this:

technorati.com Connection failed
icerocket.com Connection failed
eblogs.com Done
Ect.

Of cause the page is dynamic which is why I'm having a problem. Could I maybe search for each site in the source? But then how would I get the result which is after it? (Connection failed / Done)
Thanks a lot for the help!

Answer 1

I have tried scraping multiple sites using the simple HTML DOM PHP library, which can be obtained here: http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/

Then using code like this:

<?php
include_once 'simple_html_dom.php';

$url = "http://slashdot.org/";
$html = file_get_html($url);

//remove additional spaces
$pat[0] = "/^\s+/";
$pat[1] = "/\s{2,}/";
$pat[2] = "/\s+\$/";
$rep[0] = "";
$rep[1] = " ";
$rep[2] = "";

foreach($html->find('h2') as $heading) { //for each heading
        //find all spans with a inside then echo the found text out
        echo preg_replace($pat, $rep, $heading->find('span a', 0)->plaintext) . "\n"; 
}
?>

This results in something like:

5.8 Earthquake Hits East Coast of the US
Origins of Lager Found In Argentina
Inside Oregon State University's Open Source Lab
WebAPI: Mozilla Proposes Open App Interface For Smartphones
Using Tablets Becoming Popular Bathroom Activity
The Syrian Government's Internet Strategy
Deus Ex: Human Revolution Released
Taken Over By Aliens? Google Has It Covered
The GIMP Now Has a Working Single-Window Mode
Zombie Cookies Just Won't Die
Motorola's Most Important 18 Patents
MK-1 Robotic Arm Capable of Near-Human Dexterity, Dancing
Evangelical Scientists Debate Creation Story
Android On HP TouchPad
Google Street View Gets Israeli Government's Nod
Internet Restored In Tripoli As Rebels Take Control
GA Tech: Internet's Mid-Layers Vulnerable To Attack
Serious Crypto Bug Found In PHP 5.3.7
Twitter To Meet With UK Government About Riots
EU Central Court Could Validate Software Patents

Answer 2

This isn't the best solution, but it works:

$page = file_get_contents('http://example.com/page.html');
preg_match_all('#<strong>([^<]+)</strong><br />\s*([^<]+)<#', $page, 
                                             $result, PREG_SET_ORDER);
foreach ($result as $row) {
    echo "<p><b>$row[1]</b> $row[2]</p>\n";
}

If need to scape something more complex, consider DOMDocument.

Answer 3

You can use Regular Expressions.

Edit

Regex isn't the best solution for large problems, but for simple pages with a standard format, regex is often simplest to use.