PHP Web Scraper Basic Lesson

In previous post i've told that PHP web scraping involving several flows techniques. Today i will showing you a very basic PHP Web Scraping.

For example i will show you how to extract latest news from http://www.skali.net/web/guest/news and sort its headlines into the list.

Skali.Net News Page

Fisrt we need a very php basic code to obtain a copy of Skali News. For basic lesson i will using this code:

<?php
 $data = file_get_contents(

'http://www.skali.net/web/guest/news'

);
?>

file_get_contents is quick code to grab remoted site as string code. $data variable containing Skali News html source code.

Next, we need to parsing its headlines. For basic i will using Regex method. Before using Regex, we need to know which pattern of News Headline and what its unique angle compare to others htmls code.

Skali News Html Source Code

Refer to the screen snapshot, i have highlighted the text pattern that describing Skali news headlines.

As example:

<span style="font-size: larger;">EmbunWeb.com Are at Wordcamp Malaysia!</span>

 My Regex pattern should looks like this to match all headlines:

#<span style="font-size\: larger;">(.*?)<\/span>#is

 
The Regex pattern need to match just between <span> with font larger style. The matched pattern need to dump as array list to make sure its success.

<?php
 $data = file_get_contents('http://www.skali.net/web/guest/news');
 $regex = '#<span style="font-size\: larger;">(.*?)<\/span>#is';
 preg_match_all($regex,$data,$match);
echo '<pre>';
 echo print_r($match[1]);
echo '</pre>'; 
 ?>

Here how output using my localhost testing system:

Weehee...we got it!!

Output:

Array
(
    [0] => EmbunWeb.com Are at Wordcamp Malaysia!
    [1] => Kepakaran tempatan memacu MEB Oleh Aimi Aizal Nasharuddin
    [2] => Govt websites have markedly improved: MDeC
    [3] => Skali sees 20% growth in web hosting revenue
    [4] => Utusan Malaysia - Program SPIKE lahirkan Aisoft Solution
    [5] => The Edge Malaysia - Sure and Steady Skali
    [6] => Skali Looks Forward To Stage 2 Of MPS Project Feb 8 2010
)