Question

I need to pull a section of text from an HTML page that is not on my local site, and then have it parsed as a string. Specifically, the last column from this page. I assume I would have to copy the source of the page to a variable and then setup a regex search to navigate to that table row. Is that the most efficient way of doing it? What PHP functions would that entail?

Answer 1

• Scrape the page HTML with file_get_contents() (needs ini value allow_url_fopen to be true) or a system function like curl or wget
• Run a Regular Expression to match the desired part. You could just match any <td>s in this case, as these values are the first occurrences of table cells, e.g. preg_match("/<td.*?>(.*?)<\/td>/si",$html,$matches); (not tested)