Parse html table using file_get_contents to php array

Question

I am trying to parse the table shown here into a multi-dimensional php array. I am using the following code but for some reason its returning an empty array. After searching

Answer 1

Don't cripple yourself parsing HTML with regexps! Instead, let an HTML parser library worry about the structure of the markup for you.

I suggest you to check out Simple HTML DOM (http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/). It is a library specifically written to aid in solving this kind of web scraping problems in PHP. By using such a library, you can write your scraping in much less lines of codes without worrying about creating working regexps.

In principle, with Simple HTML DOM you just write something like:

$html = file_get_html('http://flow935.com/playlist/flowhis.HTM');
foreach($html->find('tr') as $row) {
   // Parse table row here
}

This can be then extended to capture your data in some format, for instance to create an array of artists and corresponding titles as:

find('tr') as $row) {
    $time = $row->find('td',0)->plaintext;
    $artist = $row->find('td',1)->plaintext;
    $title = $row->find('td',2)->plaintext;

    $table[$artist][$title] = true;
}

echo '
';
print_r($table);
echo '
';

?>

We can see that this code can be (trivially) changed to reformat the data in any other way as well.