hi, i need the number of lost cats & dogs per day in a specific area. so i thought the best way of doing this is to check out the classifields at the newspaper website, but they are not very specific about the topic, so i have all kinds of lost & found animals at one page. any idea how to count this animals? some people only write something like "my buddy is missing" plus a pic of a cat, so any smart idea how to do this? i only need the day and number of missing animals (preference is given to cats) for this day, nothing more. its for a kind of statistic project.
You want to write a PHP script to do this automatically? It would be faster and more accurate to do it by hand unless you intend to count for months at a time. If you do want to write a script, I'd say it will be at least 100-200 lines of code; start learning about cURL and regular expressions-- not something I'd attempt if it is your first time in PHP.
Also, if it is for a statistical project, you need to know that you are not counting the same missing cat twice. Unless you are creating a site where people enter lost cats or perusing online classifieds, I do not know of a way to get the data except on foot -- telephone pole by telephone pole.