Scraping information

I'm simply trying to collect information off a wesbite and put it into an excel sheet or something simple and organized.

Any suggestions?

 

This might help.
phpclasses.org/browse/package/86.html
web-aware.com/biff/index.htm

 

A couple of good finds there for the excel side of things. In terms of actually grabbing the content in the first place once you have the file downloaded I would just use a regular expression. In PHP I would use file_get_contents for downloading and then preg_match_all for the regular expression match.

 

Thanks I've done scraping with wordpress plugins and such. But, I've never made something by hand in PHP because I'm a novice.

 

Hopefully this should get you going.

<?php

$page = file_get_contents("http://www.text-link-ads.com/Autos-C45/");

$regex = '/<table\swidth="100%"\sborder="0"\scellpadding="0"\scellspacing="0">(.*?)<\/table>/s';

preg_match_all($regex, $page, $table);




foreach($table[0] as $entry) {

    
    preg_match_all('/<tr>(.*?)<\/tr>/s', $entry, $entry_tokens);
    
    
    
    foreach($entry_tokens as $line){
    
        print(strip_tags($line[0]));   //Description 
        print "<br><br>";
        print(strip_tags($line[1]));    //Number of pages ad will appear on
        print "<br><br>";
        print(strip_tags($line[2]));    //Spots available/filled
        print "<br><br>";
        print(strip_tags($line[3]));    //Cost
        print "<br><br>";
        
    }
    
    print "<br><br>";


}


?>

PHP:

It isn't perfect but it shows you basically what needs to be done. You'll need to study the source code for the textlinkads page and then just troubleshoot using var_dump until you are extracting all the info you need.

Any problems let me know and I'll try and help.