How do I extract data from a web page with regexes?

Question

I am writing a curl script for collecting information about some sex offenders, i have developed the script that is picking up links like given below:

http://criminaljustice.state.ny.us/cgi/internet/nsor/... (snipped URL)

Now when we go on this link I want to get information under all the fields on this page like Offender Id:, last name etc. into my own variables. I am very weak in regex that is why I am here. Or is there another way?

Can anybody help me in doing that?

Answer 1

You don't want regexes (see Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex?, look for an HTML Parser for PHP. See this answer to Can you provide an example of parsing HTML with your favorite parser?

Answer 2

phpQuery is very nice for screen-scraping in PHP. It lets you access the DOM using the same methods jQuery has.

Answer 3

I tend to agree with the previous poster about RegEx not being the right tool for the job. If you just want a quick and dirty expression, here goes:

Offender Id:.*
.* [0-9]*

NOTE: You must include the newline in this expression. Also note that this is very fragile as it will break if the source that your are parsing changes much at all.