Parse external website table

Question

There is a calendar on: http://www.friendsbalt.org/upper/stulife/calendar.asp in the form of a static table, I want to have a server grab and parse out the table row by row. Is this possible? How would you do it the most efficient way possible? Code examples would be amazing.

Answer 1

You could use something like Simple HTML DOM for php if you wanted it to be done by a web page.

require "simple_html_dom.php"; //Get this file from the link above
$html = file_get_html("http://example.com");
$data = array();
foreach($html->find("table tr") as $tr){
    $row = array();
    foreach($tr->find("td") as $td){
        /* enter code here */
        $row[] = $td->plaintext;
    }
    $data[] = $row;
}

Then all of the data will be in the $data variable.

var_dump($data); //To prove it works.

I would consider putting this in a 'refresh' script, and saving all the info to a database. Then you can just fetch the info from the database - which will be nearly instant.

Then, if you wanted, you could make a cron script to make this run ever hour by itself - updating the database so that the information in it stays fresh.

It really depends what you want to do with it :)