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

1st, asking this question goes too into details. 2nd, extracting data from a website might not be legitimate. However, I have hints:

1. Use Firebug or Chrome/Safari Inspector to explore the HTML content and pattern of interesting information

2. Test your RegEx to see if the match. You may need do it many times (multi-pass parsing/extraction)

3. Write a client via cURL or even much simpler, use file_get_contents (NOTE that some hosting disable loading URLs with file_get_contents)

For me, I'd better use Tidy to convert to valid XHTML and then use XPath to extract data, instead of RegEx. Why? Because XHTML is not regular and XPath is very flexible. You can learn XSLT to transform.

Good luck!