How to use file_get_contents or file_get_html?

php file-get-contents simple-html-dom
user2087872 picture user2087872 · Feb 19, 2013 · Viewed 63.9k times · Source

I've read through quite a few questions on here and I'm not sure if I should be using file_get_contents or file_get_html for this.

All that I'm trying to do is use PHP to display the two tables from this page on my website: http://www.statmyweb.com/recently-analyzed/

I know how to get their full page and display it on my site of course, but I can't figure out how I'm able to just pull those two tables without also getting the header/footer.

Answer

pguardiario picture pguardiario · Feb 20, 2013

You want file_get_html because file_get_contents will load the response body into a string but file_get_html will load it into simple-html-dom.

$dom = file_get_html($url);
$tables = $dom->find('table');
echo $tables[0];
echo $tables[1];

Alternatively you could use file_get_contents along with str_get_html:

$dom = str_get_html(file_get_contents($url));

But that would be silly.

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