Collecting and storing Screen Scraping Data

Hey,

Just asking for some help with scraping data off a webpage, and storing to a text/csv/xml file, or whatever works best.

So this is my basic code that scraped the info i want off a webpage:

Does anybody know a php function that allows me to print data to a file?

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

 

I hate posts like these. What would you do if you didn't have a forum to go directly to? You would use google. Google PHP File Operations. You will find an easy tutorial on how to create and manipulate text files.

Personally I would use a database to store data from a scraper.

 

Open the file you want to save to. Write each element of the array to the file. Close the file.

 

Here is a example for scraping site data using php:

$string = file_get_contents("http://example.com");
preg_match_all('%<span class="tag">(.*?)</span>%sim', $string, $result);
$result = $result[1];

foreach($result as $item){
        $item = preg_replace('%<span class="tag-chain-item-span">(.*?)</span>%sim', '$1', $item);
        $display .= '<a href="?search='.$item.'">'.$item.'</a><br>';
        }
echo $display;

PHP:

 

You could also start with an empty string. $out = "";

Then gather up all the elements in the loop $out .= "$element\r\n";

After the loop do a file_put_contents("file.txt", $out);

 

In fact, yelbom's code will throw an undefined variable error at the first execution of

$display .=

since $display hasn't been defined yet. (.= doesn't define a variable the way = does.)