Question

I am developing an application and I need to fetch of data from another source / website. I did google and tested a few options like file_get_contents / Curl. Its clear that curl is much faster compared to file_get_contents.

Now, What I need to fetch is a certain list of contents, like a list of items inside a div. I would like to ignore the HEAD info/scripts/css etc. Just need to fetch the data and style it in my own theme.

Please tell me the best method / function to get contents and style the output. If you can spare sometime and write a basic code it will be really helpful…

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I would use an HTML Parser. I use Simple HTML DOM PARSER : http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/ and it’s great. Also has a great documentation. It gives this example in its homepage:

// Create DOM from URL or file
$html = file_get_html('http://www.google.com/');

// Find all images 
foreach($html->find('img') as $element) 
       echo $element->src . '<br>';

// Find all links 
foreach($html->find('a') as $element) 
       echo $element->href . '<br>';