Scrape a price off a website

Question

Hi,

I'm trying to scrape a price from a web page using PHP and Regexes. The price will be in the format £123.12 or $123.12 (i.e., pounds or dollars).

I'm loading up the contents using libcurl. The output of which is then going into preg_match_all. So it looks a bit like this:

$contents = curl_exec($curl);

preg_match_all('/(?:\$|£)[0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]{2})?/', $contents, $matches);

So far so simple. The problem is, PHP isn't matching anything at all - even when there are prices on the page. I've narrowed it down to there being a problem with the '£' character - PHP doesn't seem to like it.

I think this might be a charset issue. But whatever I do, I can't seem to get PHP to match it! Anyone have any ideas?

(Edit: I should note if I try using the Regex Test Tool using the same regex and page content, it works fine)

Answer 1

maybe pound has it's html entity replacement? i think you should try your regexp with some sort of couching program (i.e. match it against fixed text locally).

i'd change my regexp like this: '/(?:\$|£)\d+(?:\.\d{2})?/'

Answer 2

This should work for simple values.

'#(?:\$|\£|\€)(\d+(?:\.\d+)?)#'

This will not work with thousand separator like 234,343 and 34,454.45.