Checking the presence of a link

Hey,


I am creating a site and I need to be able to check the existence of a chunk of html coding on a specific url specified by a user.

I'll have a table in a MySQL DB with the following information:

...userID.........URL............................activated
......1.............www. digitalpoint.com..........1......
......2.............www. msn.com...................1......

etc...

Obviously this is just an example.

Anyway so I need a script to take each row, check the url for the existance of a chunk of html coding, and then update the activated field to the appropriate value - 1 if the code is there, 0 if not.

I was wondering if someone could give me advice or tell me a good resource to learn how to do this.


Thanks

Hodge

 

You would need to loop through the table one line at a time. For each line you then use fopen on the url and then use the following to detect if the string exists.

?php
$mystring = 'abc';
$findme  = 'a';
$pos = strpos($mystring, $findme);

// Note our use of ===.  Simply == would not work as expected
// because the position of 'a' was the 0th (first) character.
if ($pos === false) {
   echo "The string '$findme' was not found in the string '$mystring'";
} else {
   echo "The string '$findme' was found in the string '$mystring'";
   echo " and exists at position $pos";
}
?>

PHP:

Now you can update the DB with 1 or 0 as appropriate.

 

Thanks for that

Just to clarify is $mystring= fopen( URL FROM DB ) and $findme the piece of coding I want to find on that page?

 

Go to sourceforge.net and look for a class called Snoopy. The short Readme file will show you exactly how to grab all the links from a webpage and stuff them into an array. This, plus some simple code to run through your database, should be all you need.

 

Awesome I'll check that out once I get to that stage