Extract data from website via PHP

Question

I am trying to create a simple alert app for some friends.

Basically i want to be able to extract data \"price\" and \"stock availability\" from a webpage like the f

Answer 1

It's called screen scraping, in case you need to google for it.

I would suggest that you use a dom parser and xpath expressions instead. Feed the HTML through HtmlTidy first, to ensure that it's valid markup.

For example:

$html = file_get_contents("http://www.example.com");
$html = tidy_repair_string($html);
$doc = new DomDocument();
$doc->loadHtml($html);
$xpath = new DomXPath($doc);
// Now query the document:
foreach ($xpath->query('//table[@class="pricing"]/th') as $node) {
  echo $node, "\n";
}