Php Scraping data from a website

Question

I am very new to programming and need a little help with getting data from a website and passing it into my PHP script.

The website is http://www.birthdatabase.com/.

I would like to plug in a name (First and Last) and retrieve the result. I know you can query the site by passing the name in the URL, but I am having problems scraping the results.

http://www.birthdatabase.com/cgi-bin/query.pl?textfield=FIRST&textfield2=LAST&age=&affid=

I am using the file_get_contents($URL) function to get the page but need help after that. Specifically, I would like to scrape only the results from a certain state if there are multiple results for that name.

Thanks for your help.

Its working for me ... Refer : code.google.com/p/php-html2array/downloads/… — Arvind
– Arvind, Commented Mar 24, 2013 at 17:24
I've tried using preg_match but I'm not sure if that's the best way — ChanCanasta
– ChanCanasta, Commented Mar 24, 2013 at 17:25

atwright147 · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-24 20:19:19Z

2

You need the awesome simple_html_dom class.

With this class you can query the webpage's DOM in a similar way to jQuery.

First include the class in your page, then get the page content with this snippet:

$html = file_get_html('http://www.birthdatabase.com/cgi-bin/query.pl?textfield=' . $first . '&textfield2=' . $last . '&age=&affid=');

Then you can use CSS selections to scrape your data (something like this):

$n = 0;
foreach($html->find('table tbody tr td div font b table tbody') as $element) {
    @$row[$n]['tr']  = $element->find('tr')->text;
    $n++;
}

// output your data
print_r($row);

edited Mar 24, 2013 at 20:19

answered Mar 24, 2013 at 18:02

atwright147

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8 Comments

ChanCanasta Over a year ago

Thanks for the help. This class definitely looks like what I need. The output from birthdatabase.com contains multiple tables and there are no unique tags to scrape. I hope i'm using the right terminology. I am such a noob at all of this, so any help would be appreciated.

atwright147 Over a year ago

I'm not from the US so I don't know the answer to this but could you use the ZIP code to force the state you want somehow?

ChanCanasta Over a year ago

The states are listed as part of the output. I could probably search for the appropriate values in the array and then output the corresponding birthdays. I guess my question is still in relation to getting that array in the first place. The output of the database has multiple tables that contain ads and other nonsense that I don't want in the array. How do i get around that?

atwright147 Over a year ago

Otherwise you will need to either find a way to make them un-paginate the data or make MANY requests to their server. To get all items -- then loop and filter based on the state column.

atwright147 Over a year ago

I have amended my answer with a better CSS DOM path

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