Hi, I have spent the entire week and 7 hours atleast each day trying to learn how I can extract calendar data such as events on a specific date. I am reallly confused as I am a fairly new scripting programmer, I have known basic PHP all the way upto file reading but now I am having to learn more...I am really frustrated because I don't know what to do. Apparently screen scrapping wont work because if there are updates in the calendar the whole thing crashes, not that I fully know how screen scrapping works...I don't know howe to parse html data etc any help is realllllyyyy appreciated...im stuck..
If it's a weak to medium strength site, you can use CURL. On medium strength sites, you'll have to do a little referrer spoofing. Honestly, would be best to get the site owners permission. Without referrer spoofing, a simple script can see that the request is coming from a site not of their own, and just block the request.
If you don't know how to parse the document, check and read the DOMDocument and DOMXpath Library of PHP http://php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php http://php.net/manual/en/class.domxpath.php
i guess you can get the content of a particular page using curl Then analyze the source code for a particular page Even if it is getting updated, still the layout and format of the page might be same. Look out for a particular pattern Then you can use preg_match to get the contents of the exact portion of that page Then on further filtering that data, i guess you will be able to achieve what you intend to. The important things you should look out for are : using curl, preg_match, preg_match_all Then you can run loops and gather data easily from the entire site. Hope it helps.