php curl regular expression question

ChicoMendez

hi

i need to get a specific value from a webpage im getting via php and curl but im having issues

suppose i have the content of a whole page in a variable called $content

suppose i want the price for a table as below :

<td class="listprice">$50.00 </td>

how do i read the actual price into a variable ?
ie say get the content in between '<td class="listprice">' and '</td>' ?

thanks

forbairt

http://ie.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php

louie

[php]
preg_match('/<td\sclass=[\'\"]listprice[\'\"]>(.*?)<\/td>/si',$str,$matches);
[/php]

give this a try

ChicoMendez

thats great louie

however supposing im going to be using this alot is there any way to turn my search strings into regular expressions. for example something like this

function change2reg($str){

TURN $str into regular expression $ret

return $ret;
}

$termtochangeb4='<td class="listprice">';

$termtochangeaR=change2reg($str)




preg_match('/$termtochangeaR(.*?)<\/td>/si',$str,$matches);


u follow ?

louie

did you try it?
Are you getting an error?

forbairt

ChicoMendez wrote: »

thats great louie

however supposing im going to be using this alot is there any way to turn my search strings into regular expressions. for example something like this

function change2reg($str){

TURN $str into regular expression $ret

return $ret;
}

$termtochangeb4='<td class="listprice">';

$termtochangeaR=change2reg($str)




preg_match('/$termtochangeaR(.*?)<\/td>/si',$str,$matches);


u follow ?

'$termtochangeaR' won't be recognized it'd need to be in "'s

you'll also want to addslashes to the search term

you'll run into a problem if you've a nested table as well ...

Serbian

I'm really questioning why you need to create Regular Expressions on the fly. Can you give us any more info on what you are actually trying to do?

ChicoMendez

Serbian wrote: »

I'm really questioning why you need to create Regular Expressions on the fly. Can you give us any more info on what you are actually trying to do?

ok bascially i want to grab product info from certain suppliers sites - details like product code, price, description etc etc etc

basically i would create an array of links to product pages for supplier 1 and my code would run through the array calling a function that would grab the data from each page and write it to a db.

so why do i want to be able to create the regular expressions on the fly - so as basically when it comes to supplier 2,3,4,5,6,7 etc then all i have to do is pass in the html code before and after the required info (eg price) and the html code would be converted to a regular expression on the fly therefore saving me the hassle of creating regular expressions for each supplier

u follow ?

AARRRGH

I do a lot of spidering stuff.

You need to loop through each page of results, e.g.

for each supplier
for each page of that suppliers products

I normally just match a group of HTML on the page, e.g. first product to last product, and then split the products up using a regex. The HTML should only change slightly between each product, and generally the bits which have changed are the bits which you'd want to save anyway, such as the product title, code, etc.

I really recommend you read the O'Reilly Regular Expressions book.