Help required with grabbing specific data from a web page

Hello,

Could someone please help me with a simple script that grabs a specific value from a web page?

The page contains a table with a column for player id and player points enclosed by <td></td> tags.

There is 357 players in the table each with a player id and player points.

The code i am using is as follows:

$url = file_get_contents("http://www.myurl.com");

preg_match('~<td>(.*?[^<])</td>~i',$url,$points);
print $points[1];

Code (markup):

I can only grab the first points value.

How can I grab the players points for each player?

Regards

Central

 

You're going to need some kind of loop, I think. Perhaps a while loop? From your code, you're just checking one cell (<td></td>).

 

$url = file_get_contents("http://www.myurl.com");

preg_match_all('~<td>(.*?[^<])</td>~i',$url,$points);
for ($i=0;$i<count($points[0]);$i++) {
echo $point=$points[0][$i];
}

 

Thanks guys i'll give it a try and see how i go.

 

Yeah that works fine to display the data.

My next mission is to update each player in the db with their latest points.

I have the following code

mysql_connect("server","user","password");
mysql_select_db("database");

$url = file_get_contents("http://www.mydomain.com");

preg_match_all('~<td>(.*?[^<])</td>~i',$url,$points);

for($i=0;$i<count($points[0]);$i++)
	{
	$point = $points[0][$i];
	$sql = "UPDATE players_table SET points = '$point' WHERE id = '$i'";
	$result = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());
	if($result != false)
	{
	print "Updated row $i with points = $point<br>";
	}
             else
             {
             print "Error updating row $i<br>";
	}
mysql_close();

PHP:

When i run this script it doesn't insert anything in to the db apart from 0 (zero) yet when i print it out it shows the points....

Any ideas why it's doing this?

Regards

 

hmmn.. you sure that their corresponding id was their row position (id = '$i')?
also try to replace
if($result != false)
with
if(mysql_affected_rows() != 0)

 

for($i=0;$i<count($points[0]);$i++)
{
$point = $points[0][$i];

Maybe I'm wrong (only given it a couple moment's thought), but this line:
for($i=0;$i<count($points[0]);$i++) is using $points as an array of one dimension, and this line: $point = $points[0][$i]; is using it as two (dimensioned array). Maybe you want $point = $points[$i]; ???

 

Ok so i figured out what was happening......

The preg_match_all() function was returning the whole string including all html tags.

When trying to insert these into a integer db field it was inserting a 0.

Soooo...

I stripped away the non numeric chars with preg_replace() and trimmed all remaining white space with trim() so all i am left with is the numeric data i require. Which gets me through that problem.

However...

There are some minus figures in the string which are being turned into plus figures because of the preg_replace() function is removing the hyphen (-) before the number.

Anyone know of a way to exclude the hyphen (-) from the search for non numeric chars?

Regards

 

Right then all figured out now.

To get around the minus (-) being removed by the preg_replace() function i set it to remove only the html tags.

mysql_connect("server","user","password");
mysql_select_db("database");

$url = file_get_contents("http://www.mydomain.com");

preg_match_all('~<td>(.*?[^<])</td>~i',$url,$points);

for($i=0;$i<count($points[0]);$i++)
	{
	$point = preg_replace('/<td>/','',$points[0][$i]);
	$sql = "UPDATE Players_test SET points = '".trim(preg_replace('/<\/td>/','',$point))."' WHERE id = '$i'";
	$result = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());
	if($result != false)
		{
		print "Updated row $i with points = $point<br>";
		}
	}
mysql_close();

PHP:

Thank you to you all.

Regards

Central