使用Curl从html表中获取信息

Question

i need to get some information about some plants and put it into mysql table. My knowledge on Curl and DOM is quite null, but i've come to this:

    set_time_limit(0);
include('simple_html_dom.php');


$ch = curl_init ("http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/1501/"); 

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;     rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("Accept-Language: es-es,en"));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,0); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
$data = curl_exec ($ch); 
curl_close ($ch); 


$html= str_get_html($data);


$e = $html->find("table", 8);

 echo $e->innertext;

now, i'm really lost about how to move in from this point, can you please guide me?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is a mess.

But at least it's a (somewhat) consistent mess.

If this is a one time extraction and not a rolling project, personally I'd use quick and dirty regex on this instead of simple_html_dom. You'll be there all day twiddling with the tags otherwise.

For example, this regex pulls out the majority of title/data pairs:

$pattern = "/<b>(.*?)</b>\s*<br>(.*?)</?(td|p)>/si";

You'll need to do some pre and post cleaning before it will get them all though.

I don't envy you having this task...