Can I use cURL to grab a html table?

Question

Hi all,

I'm trying to use cURL to grab an external web page to put into my own website, it's basically a "ladder" of a sports team, I contacted them, but they do not have a RSS feed of the ladder, so I'm trying to obtain the ladder by other means, is it possible to grab everything between < table > and < / table > using cURL? I can grab the page that I want using the following code, but I don't need anything else except for the HTML table.

$ch = curl_init ("http://www.sportingpulse.com/rpt_ladder.cgi?results=N&round=15&client=1-3909-47801-81021-6151461&pool=-1");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
echo $page = curl_exec($ch);

If someone could help me out, that'd be great. Thanks

Leanne

Answer 1

You'll need to use curl to grab the contents of the page and string processing to extract the table from the returned string.

A simple regex to start would be:

/<table>(.*)<\/table/s

So if you take your example above, you'd do something like:

$page = curl_exec($ch);

if (preg_match("/<table>(.*)<\/table/s", $page, $matches)) {
    echo $matches[1];
}

This code will match the first table on the page. You'd need to tweak it to match exactly the HTML you want to extract.

Answer 2

Ok, so I managed to get it working using this (if anyone else wants to know)

$ch = curl_init ("http://www.sportingpulse.com/rpt_ladder.cgi?results=N&round=15&client=1-3909-47801-81021-6151461&pool=-1");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$page = curl_exec($ch);

preg_match('#<table[^>]*>(.+?)</table>#is', $page, $matches);
foreach ($matches as &$match) {
    $match = $match;
}
echo '<table>';
    echo $matches[1];
echo '</table>';

:)

Answer 3

An alternative option to pure regex would be to use DOMDocument and xPath. This turns the entire document into an object and makes working with the contents of the table easier