Question

Retrieving a value inside of a span id?

<span id="playerCount">157,767 people currently online</span>

How would I go about getting the value inside that ID? I thought of preg_match() but is that even safe?

Answer 1

Use php’s DOM methods. The following code assumes you have allow_url_fopen enabled:

$domd = new DOMDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$domd->loadHTML(file_get_contents($url));
libxml_use_internal_errors(false);

$span = $domd->getElementById("playerCount");
$span_contents = $span->textContent;