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

I tried simple_html_dom but on larger files and on repeat calls to the function I am getting zend_mm_heap_corrupted on php 5.3 (GAH). I have also tried preg_match_all (but this has been failing on a larger file (5000) lines of html, which was only about 400 rows of my HTML table.

I am using this and its working fast and not spitting errors.

$dom = new DOMDocument();  

//load the html  
$html = $dom->loadHTMLFile("htmltable.html");  

  //discard white space   
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;   

  //the table by its tag name  
$tables = $dom->getElementsByTagName('table');   


    //get all rows from the table  
$rows = $tables->item(0)->getElementsByTagName('tr');   
  // get each column by tag name  
$cols = $rows->item(0)->getElementsByTagName('th');   
$row_headers = NULL;
foreach ($cols as $node) {
    //print $node->nodeValue."\n";   
    $row_headers[] = $node->nodeValue;
}   

$table = array();
  //get all rows from the table  
$rows = $tables->item(0)->getElementsByTagName('tr');   
foreach ($rows as $row)   
{   
   // get each column by tag name  
    $cols = $row->getElementsByTagName('td');   
    $row = array();
    $i=0;
    foreach ($cols as $node) {
        # code...
        //print $node->nodeValue."\n";   
        if($row_headers==NULL)
            $row[] = $node->nodeValue;
        else
            $row[$row_headers[$i]] = $node->nodeValue;
        $i++;
    }   
    $table[] = $row;
}   

var_dump($table);

This code worked well for me. Example of original code is here.

http://techgossipz.blogspot.co.nz/2010/02/how-to-parse-html-using-dom-with-php.html

Answer 2

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:

<?php
require('simple_html_dom.php');

$table = array();

$html = file_get_html('http://flow935.com/playlist/flowhis.HTM');
foreach($html->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 '<pre>';
print_r($table);
echo '</pre>';

?>

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