regex - scraping javascript

Question

I am trying to scrape some data out of an HTML page that I'm getting with cURL. I've been using a PHP DOM lib called ganon; but in this case, the number I need is in Javascript.

{
  label: "Views<span class='Footnote'>*</span>",
  type: "other",
  id: "Views",
  value: "7"
}

I only need the 7. So if I could match on id: "Views", and get everything up to the closing } and only return numbers; I believe this is possible -- I've been working on it but REGEX is certainly not my strong suite.

Don't use regex. This block is a JSON string, try using json_decode. — gen_Eric
– gen_Eric, Commented Nov 7, 2012 at 16:42

hakre · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-07 16:44:57Z

1

I'd say this is rather straight forward:

$value = preg_replace('(.*value: "(\d+)".*)s', '\1', $scrape);

Gives you a string of 7.

You can still prefix with the id: "Views", part, I leave that as an excercise.

answered Nov 7, 2012 at 16:44

hakre

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3 Comments

Ecropolis Over a year ago

Thank you! I see this works with the string above but I'm struggling to extract that code block from the HTML document. This is the actual file dropbox.com/s/22f5l34kp0d7qs9/blip.html (line 665)

hakre Over a year ago

Well, it was not meant to parse the full HTML. Let that work do by a HTML parser, one exists in PHP: DomDocument. Fetch the javascript from within the one script tag it is in only. That greatly reduces your problems and the HTML parsing is stable. If you do scraping it's worth to know about it anyway.

Ecropolis Over a year ago

I was able to parse the HTML down the the script node dropbox.com/s/22f5l34kp0d7qs9/blip.html. Still struggling to extract the value I'm after at line 128 now.

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