Re: Retrieving Content

Rodrigo de Oliveira Costa wrote:

Hi guys, I'm trying to retrieve a certain variable from a site. Here it goes: The site has a SELECT box that is dynamicaly updated, I need to put a script running that will retrieve the specified SELECT with its contents, that are labels and values. Is there a way to retrieve the page and then select just one line of the code, discard the rest and then retrieve from this line the values? Here goes the SELECT : <SELECT title='navigation' Name=navigating onChange="self.location = '/s/2318355/'+ this.options[this.selectedIndex].value + '/';"><option value=1 selected>1. Name<option value=2 >2. Name</select> I need to get something like this: $select = navigating; $label1 = "1.Name"; $value1 = 1; $label2 = "2.Name"; $value2 = 2; Remmembering that the SELECT is dynamic so I need also to check how many labels and values there are and store them into variables. I getting a really hard time doing this. I thank any imput you guys can give me. Thanx, Rodrigo

First, get the file using file_get_contents(). Now, do two nested regular expression matches. As in, do a regular expression match to get all the <select></select> blocks, and then for each match do another regular expression match to grab all the <option> blocks. Alternatively, you could do this with strpos(), since it lets you specify where to START searching from. It might be faster, but it would probably end up being less flexible. Alternatively, if you need a super robust solution, you might want to look into actual HTML parsing libraries, like tidy (which has a PHP module). Regards, Adam Zey.