How to copy content from a dynamic page using PHP?

Question

Is it possible to get the information displayed in the page link given below using PHP. I want all the text content displayed on the page to be copied to a variable or to a file.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/24655740?report=fasta&format=text

I have tried cURL too, but it didn't work. Where as cURL worked with a few other sites I know. But even if solutions with cURL are there do post. I might have tried various methods in which cURL can be used.

Answer 1

You need to request the url used by form to show this result via javascript.

I founded this final url

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sviewer/viewer.fcgi?val=24655740&db=nuccore&dopt=fasta&extrafeat=0&fmt_mask=0&maxplex=1&sendto=t&withmarkup=on&log$=seqview&maxdownloadsize=1000000

Pay attention to use 24655740 from your first link in this request.

You can use cURL.

Answer 2

Use cURL to get the page content and then parse it - extract the <pre> section.

$ch = curl_init();

// Set query data here with the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'val=24655740&db=nuccore&dopt=fasta&extrafeat=0&fmt_mask=0&maxplex=1&sendto=t&withmarkup=on&log$=seqview&maxdownloadsize=1000000'); 

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, '3');
$content = trim(curl_exec($ch));
curl_close($ch);
// show ALL the content
print $content;

$start_index = strpos($content, '<pre>')+5;
$end_index = strpos($content, '</pre>');
$your_text = substr($content, $start_index, $end_index-$start_index);

UPDATE

Using the link from @ovitinho's answer - it now works :)