Question

I’m a beginning programmer who is trying to capture data from this source

Here’s the specific part I’m trying to capture:

<ul class="ingredient-wrap">

            <li id="liIngredient" data-ingredientid="3914" data-grams="907.2">
                <label>
                    <span class="checkbox-formatted"><input id="cbxIngredient" type="checkbox" name="ctl00$CenterColumnPlaceHolder$recipeTest$recipe$ingredients$rptIngredientsCol1$ctl01$cbxIngredient" /></span>
                    <p class="fl-ing" itemprop="ingredients">
                        <span id="lblIngAmount" class="ingredient-amount">2 pounds</span>
                        <span id="lblIngName" class="ingredient-name">ground beef chuck</span>

                    </p>
                </label>
            </li>

            <li id="liIngredient" data-ingredientid="5838" data-grams="454">
                <label>
                    <span class="checkbox-formatted"><input id="cbxIngredient" type="checkbox" name="ctl00$CenterColumnPlaceHolder$recipeTest$recipe$ingredients$rptIngredientsCol1$ctl02$cbxIngredient" /></span>
                    <p class="fl-ing" itemprop="ingredients">
                        <span id="lblIngAmount" class="ingredient-amount">1 pound</span>
                        <span id="lblIngName" class="ingredient-name">bulk Italian sausage</span>

                    </p>
                </label>
            </li>

            <li id="liIngredient" data-ingredientid="10429" data-grams="1278">
                <label>
                    <span class="checkbox-formatted"><input id="cbxIngredient" type="checkbox" name="ctl00$CenterColumnPlaceHolder$recipeTest$recipe$ingredients$rptIngredientsCol1$ctl03$cbxIngredient" /></span>
                    <p class="fl-ing" itemprop="ingredients">
                        <span id="lblIngAmount" class="ingredient-amount">3 (15 ounce) cans</span>
                        <span id="lblIngName" class="ingredient-name">chili beans, drained</span>

                    </p>
                </label>
            </li>

Each li contains two sets of words, for example: 3 (15 ounce) cans and chili beans, drained I’m trying to use a foreach loop to grab the two set of words from each li, and then combine and save into a database.

Here’s my code:

foreach($html->find(".ingredient-wrap", 0)->children as $e){
              $ingredients = $e->plaintext;
              echo trim($ingredients);
              $hostname = 'localhost';
              $username = '********';
              $password = '*******';
              $conn = new PDO("mysql:host=$hostname;dbname=*********", $username, $password);
              $sql = ("INSERT INTO ingredients (recipe_id, ingredientname) VALUES (?, ?)");
              $q = $conn->prepare($sql);
              $q->execute(array($recipe_id,$ingredients));
          }

The problem with this is that after inserting into the database, the value for each ingredientname is …, even though if you echo out echo $ingredients."<br/>" you are presented with a list of the combined word with a space after it.

Thanks for any and all help! If you have any questions or need more clarifying, I’m here to reply!

Answer 1

Getting a “list” is normal. You’re using ->innertext to get the ingredients. Essentially you’re doing striptags() on the html that contains the ingredients, leaving you with just some bare text. You should be looping over each ingredient tag separately.