Question

When I press ‘View source code’ of a certain web page, it’s kind of like this:

<form action="/WANem/index-advanced.php" method="post">
<table border="1" width="100%">
  <tr>
    <td width="10%" >Delay time(ms) </td>
    <td width="10%" ><input type="text" name="txtDelay1" size="7" value=1200>
  </td>
  <input type="submit" value="Apply settings" name="btnApply">  
</table>
</form>

My question is: How can i get ‘1200’ in the code using PHP.
I mean i just want to get a certain string in the html code of another website without having to press ‘view source code’ and copy that string.
Thanks for any reply.

Answer 1

What you’re trying to do is called “web scraping”.

Here’s a StackOverflow question with a bunch of helpful answers:

How to implement a web scraper in PHP?

And here is a tutorial that probably explains it better than I could by typing it out here:

http://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/blog/web-scrape-with-php-tutorial

Hope it helps and good luck!