Question

I was trying to scrape imdb by following code.

$url = "http://www.imdb.com/search/title?languages=en|1&explore=year";
$html = new simple_html_dom();
$html->load(str_replace(' ','',$data = get_data($url)));

foreach($html->find('#left') as $total_movies)
{
$content = $total_movies->plaintext;
if(preg_match("/(?<total>[0-9,]+) titles/",$content,$matches))
{
    print_r($matches);
}
echo $content."<br>";
}

get_data() is just a curl function i created.

The problem is that preg_match is not working. i don’t know why but the same thing when used work here. $content contains the text what i scrape in above code.

$content = "1-50 of 101 titles.";
if(preg_match("/(?<total>[0-9,]+) titles/",$content,$matches))
print_r($matches);

Answer 1

The source on the site is actually:

<div id="left">
1-50 of 564,592
titles.
</div>

notice the \n this would need stripping out or added to your condition.

Heres a method to reach your goal without using any added extra library.

  <?php 
    $url = "http://www.imdb.com/search/title?languages=en|1&explore=year";
    $temp=file_get_contents($url);

    $xml = new DOMDocument();
    @$xml->loadHTML($temp);

    foreach($xml->getElementsByTagName('div') as $div) {
        if($div->getAttribute('id')=='left'){
            preg_match("#of ([0-9,]+)#",$div->nodeValue,$match);
            $matchs[]=preg_replace('/[^0-9]/', '', $match[0]);
        }
    }

    echo number_format($matchs[0]); //564,592

    ?>