Question

I have a problem – a parser that does not parse. It does not work! It gives not back anything! Well, I want to get something back – and store the results in a mysql-database.

<?PHP
// Original PHP code by Chirp Internet: http://www.chirp.com.au
// Please acknowledge use of this code by including this header.

$url = "http://www.edi.admin.ch/esv/00475/00698/index.html?lang=de";

//$input = @file_get_contents($url) or die("Could not access file: $url");

$input = file_get_contents($url) or die("Could not access file: $url"); 

$regexp = "<a\s[^>]*href=(\"??)([^\" >]*?)\\1[^>]*>(.*)<\/a>";
if(preg_match_all("/$regexp/siU", $input, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER))
{
    foreach($matches as $match) 
    {
        // $match[2] = all the data i want to collect...
        // $match[3] = text that i need to collect - see a detail-page
    }
}
?>

It goes a bit over my head: It does not give back any results. Do I have to use file_get_contents() with a query string?

Answer 1

You can only use fopen-like functions with a url if the appropriate fopen wrapper is enabled.

See: http://www.php.net/manual/en/filesystem.configuration.php#ini.allow-url-fopen

While I would second the ‘regex isn’t good for html,’ if this is just for a little script, who cares? That being said, DOMDocument and friends are easy enough to use.

Josh