Extract data from website via PHP

It's called screen scraping, in case you need to google for it. I would suggest that you use a dom parser and xpath expressions instead. Feed the HTML through HtmlTidy first, to ensure that it's valid markup. For example: $html = file_get_contents("http://www.example.com"); $html = tidy_repair_string($html); $doc = new DomDocument(); $doc->loadHtml($html); $xpath = new DomXPath($doc); // Now query the document: foreach ($xpath->query('//table[@class="pricing"]/th') as $node) { echo $node, "\n"; }

What ever you do: Don't use regular expressions to parse HTML or http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454. Use a http://de3.php.net/manual/en/refs.xml.php instead.

You are probably best off loading the HTML code into a DOM parser like http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/manual.htm and searching for the "pricing" table. However, any kind of scraping you do can break whenever they change their page layout, and is probably illegal without their consent. The best way, though, would be to talk to the people who run the site, and see whether they have alternative, more reliable forms of data delivery (Web services, RSS, or database exports come to mind).

1st, asking this question goes too into details. 2nd, extracting data from a website might not be legitimate. However, I have hints: Use Firebug or Chrome/Safari Inspector to explore the HTML content and pattern of interesting information Test your RegEx to see if the match. You may need do it many times (multi-pass parsing/extraction) Write a client via cURL or even much simpler, use file_get_contents (NOTE that some hosting disable loading URLs with file_get_contents) For me, I'd better use Tidy to convert to valid XHTML and then use XPath to extract data, instead of RegEx. Why? Because XHTML is not regular and XPath is very flexible. You can learn XSLT to transform. Good luck!

The best HTML Parse I've ever come across. http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/