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Easy scraping and HTML parsing with PHP5 and XPath

/ Published in: PHP
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This example uses file_get_contents to retrieve remote HTML. From there, we can parse through it using PHP5's DOMDocument and DOMXpath. XPath Queries are easy to create using the Firefox extension "XPather"

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Copy this code and paste it in your HTML 
  1. <?php
  2. //a URL you want to retrieve
  3. $my_url = 'http://www.digg.com';
  4. $html = file_get_contents($my_url);
  5. $dom = new DOMDocument();
  6. $dom->loadHTML($html);
  7. $xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
  8.  
  9. //Put your XPath Query here
  10. $my_xpath_query = "/html/body/div[@id='container']/div[@id='contents']/div[@class='list' and @id='wrapper']/div[@class='main' and position()=1]/div[contains(@class, 'news-summary')]/div[@class='news-body']/h3";
  11. $result_rows = $xpath->query($my_xpath_query);
  12.  
  13. //here we loop through our results (a DOMDocument Object)
  14. foreach ($result_rows as $result_object){
  15. 	echo $result_object->childNodes->item(0)->nodeValue;
  16. }
  17. ?>

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