I am trying to parse the table shown here into a multi-dimensional php array. I am using the following code but for some reason its returning an empty array. After searching around on the web, I found this site which is where I got the parseTable() function from. From reading the comments on that website, I see that the function works perfectly. So I'm assuming there is something wrong with the way I'm getting the HTML code from file_get_contents(). Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong?
<?php
$data = file_get_contents('http://flow935.com/playlist/flowhis.HTM');
function parseTable($html)
{
// Find the table
preg_match("/<table.*?>.*?<\/[\s]*table>/s", $html, $table_html);
// Get title for each row
preg_match_all("/<th.*?>(.*?)<\/[\s]*th>/", $table_html[0], $matches);
$row_headers = $matches[1];
// Iterate each row
preg_match_all("/<tr.*?>(.*?)<\/[\s]*tr>/s", $table_html[0], $matches);
$table = array();
foreach($matches[1] as $row_html)
{
preg_match_all("/<td.*?>(.*?)<\/[\s]*td>/", $row_html, $td_matches);
$row = array();
for($i=0; $i<count($td_matches[1]); $i++)
{
$td = strip_tags(html_entity_decode($td_matches[1][$i]));
$row[$row_headers[$i]] = $td;
}
if(count($row) > 0)
$table[] = $row;
}
return $table;
}
$output = parseTable($data);
print_r($output);
?>
I want my output array to look something like this:
1 --> 11:33AM --> DEV --> IN THE DARK 2 --> 11:29AM --> LIL' WAYNE --> SHE WILL 3 --> 11:26AM --> KARDINAL OFFISHALL --> NUMBA 1 (TIDE IS HIGH)
Don't cripple yourself parsing HTML with regexps! Instead, let an HTML parser library worry about the structure of the markup for you.
I suggest you to check out Simple HTML DOM (http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/). It is a library specifically written to aid in solving this kind of web scraping problems in PHP. By using such a library, you can write your scraping in much less lines of codes without worrying about creating working regexps.
In principle, with Simple HTML DOM you just write something like:
$html = file_get_html('http://flow935.com/playlist/flowhis.HTM');
foreach($html->find('tr') as $row) {
// Parse table row here
}
This can be then extended to capture your data in some format, for instance to create an array of artists and corresponding titles as:
<?php
require('simple_html_dom.php');
$table = array();
$html = file_get_html('http://flow935.com/playlist/flowhis.HTM');
foreach($html->find('tr') as $row) {
$time = $row->find('td',0)->plaintext;
$artist = $row->find('td',1)->plaintext;
$title = $row->find('td',2)->plaintext;
$table[$artist][$title] = true;
}
echo '<pre>';
print_r($table);
echo '</pre>';
?>
We can see that this code can be (trivially) changed to reformat the data in any other way as well.