Question

This website lists over 250 courses in one list. I want to get the name of each course and insert that into my mysql database using php. The courses are listed like this:

<td> computer science</td>
<td> media studeies</td>
…

Is there a way to do that in PHP, instead of me having a mad data entry nightmare?

Answer 1

Regular expressions work well.

$page = // get the page
$page = preg_split("/\n/", $page);
for ($text in $page) {
    $matches = array();
    preg_match("/^<td>(.*)<\/td>$/", $text, $matches);
    // insert $matches[1] into the database
}

See the documentation for preg_match.