How do I extract text data from a web page?

Question

Okay, so I have the following function that grabs the web page I need:

function login2($url2) {
   $fp = fopen("cookie.txt", "w");
   fclose($fp);
   $login2 = curl_init();
   curl_setopt($login2, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookies.txt");
   curl_setopt($login2, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookies.txt");
   curl_setopt($login2, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 40000);
   curl_setopt($login2, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
   curl_setopt($login2, CURLOPT_URL, $url2);
   curl_setopt($login2, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
   curl_setopt($login2, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false);

   [...]

I then issue this to use the function:

echo login2("https://example.com/clue/holes.aspx");

This echoes the page I am requesting but I only want it to echo a specific piece of data from the HTML source. Here's the specific markup:

<h4>
   <label id="cooling percent" for="symbol">*</label>
   4.50
</h4>

The only piece of information I want is the figure, which in this specific example is 4.50.

So how can I go about this and make my cURL grab this and echo it instead of echoing the entire page?

You can solve this with XPath but I need more HTML code from you. — silkfire, Jun 17 '13 at 20:21
bwoebi i like that idea i have use dom parser a long time ago but i just cant rember for the lif of me how to do it can u help — Ashley Graham, Jun 17 '13 at 20:22
For example, an `id` can't contain a space: `id="cooling percent"`, is that really how it comes up in the web page? — silkfire, Jun 17 '13 at 20:26
silk fire any help on how i can do this would be appreciated — Ashley Graham, Jun 17 '13 at 20:30

silkfire · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-17T20:39:43.353

0

You can solve this with XPath:

$html = login2('https://example.com/clue/holes.aspx');

$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);

$value = $xpath->query('//label[@id="ctl00_ctl00_PageContainer_MyAccountContainer_symPound"]/following-sibling::text()')->item(0)->nodeValue;

echo $value;

edited Jun 17 '13 at 20:39

answered Jun 17 '13 at 20:32

silkfire

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How do I extract text data from a web page?

1 Answers1