I've been doing PHP for about six years now. I wrote you a little function which should handle what you want, if I've understood your query.
Anyway, the trick is to, in simple terms, send a header request to the target url, stream the context then open the url with fopen. Once we've done this we can use the standard file_get_contents() function to grab it. This will give you the entire HTML from <html> to </html>.
From here, I generated and escaped a regular expression to grab portions of the page between whatever delimeters you supply the function with.
Note: The function returns an array of all matches as well as the delimeters that surrounded it. This is why I used $external[1] because the function returned
array('<title>', 'Whatever the Title is', '</title>');If you searched with the delimiters of <div> and </div> and your page has quite a few divs. you will likely get an array like this. (Remember the results may have HTML in them)
array(
'<div>', 'contents <em>of</em> div', '</div>',
'<div>', 'contents of div 2', '</div>',
'<div>', 'contents of div 3', '</div>'
);Remember you can use print_r(); on an array to view it's contents to help you locate the content you want.
The function is fully commented just incase you need to tweak it, or even learn from it.
Anyway, as I don't know your level of PHP Skill I've rambled into detail to much.. On with the epicness....
The function itself..
<?php
/*
external_url_content( string, string, string )
Grab text from external website using an
opening and closing delimeter.
Param: $url | String | External URL to grab content from
Param: $opendelim | String | Opening delimeter
Param: $closedelim | String | Closing delimeter
Return: Array of results or False on failure
*/
function external_url_content( $url = null, $opendelim = null, $closedelim = null )
{
if( is_null( $url ) || is_null( $opendelim ) || is_null( $closedelim ) ){
trigger_error( 'external_url_content() expects three paramters. Null given.', E_USER_ERROR );
}
// Create a header request
$headreq = array(
'http'=>array(
'method'=>"GET",
'header'=>"Accept-language: en\r\n" . "Cookie: foo=bar\r\n"
)
);
// Stream the context
$context = stream_context_create( $headreq );
// Open URL and grab resource
$fopen = fopen( $url, 'r', false, $context );
// Grab content of the open url
$contents = file_get_contents( $url, false, $context );
// Close connection to external site.
fclose( $fopen );
// Escape <, > and / from delimiters for regex to work
$opendelim = preg_quote( $opendelim, '/' );
$closedelim = preg_quote( $closedelim, '/' );
// Build regular expression
$expression = "/{$opendelim}(.*?){$closedelim}/is";
if( preg_match( $expression, $contents, $matches ) == false ){
return false;
}
return $matches;
}
?>
How to use it.. (In this example, I connected to Aria.co.uk and grabbed the <title></title> content.
<?php
$external = external_url_content( 'http://www.aria.co.uk', '<title>', '</title>' );
if( false == $external ){
echo 'Could not grab content from external URL';
} else {
echo $external[1] .'<br />';
}
?>And the result it produced was;
Aria PC - Computer Hardware, Components, Monitors.. at lowest pricesI've only tested it on aria's title delimeters so I cannot promise it'll work in every situation. If you need it tweaking to do something else, or if you find a bug or something just let me know.
----------------------------------
EDIT: Woops.. Forgot an s in the regex.. It should now match <p class="whatever"> delimters to.
$external = external_url_content( 'http://www.aria.co.uk', '<p class="small grew">', '</p>' );
if( false == $external ){
echo 'Could not grab content from external URL';
} else {
echo $external[1] .'<br />';
}
Will return;
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