Question

I am looking to draw html of a webpage inside my website.

Take this scenario:

I have a website that checks availability of a hotel. But instead of hosting that hotel’s images on my server. I simple curl, a specific page on the hotels website that contains their images.

Can I grab anything from the html and display it on my website? using their HTML code, but only the div(s) or images that i want to display?

I’m using this code, sourced from:

http://davidwalsh.name/download-urls-content-php-curl

As practice and arguments sake, lets try and display Google’s logo from their homepage.

function get_data($url)
{
    $ch = curl_init();
    $timeout = 5;
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $data;
}

$returned_content = get_data('http://www.google.com');
echo '<base href="http://www.google.com/" />';
echo $returned_content;

Thanks to @alex I have started to play with DOMDocument in PHP’s lib. However, I have hit a snag.

    function get_data($url)
{
    $ch = curl_init();
    $timeout = 5;
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $data;
}

$url = "www.abc.net.au";
$html = get_data($url);

$dom = new DOMDocument;
@$dom->loadHTML($html);
$logo = $dom->getElementById("abcLogo");
var_dump($logo);

Returns: object(DOMElement)[2]

How do I parse this further? Or Simply just print/echo the contents of the DIV with that id..?

Answer 1

Once you have found a DOM element, it can be a bit tricky to get the HTML of the element itself (rather than just its contents).

You can get the XML value of a single element very easily with DOMDocument::saveXML:

echo $dom->saveXML($logo);

This may be good enough for you. I believe there is a change coming that will add this functionality to saveHTML as well.