Extracting data form website using php

Question

I have the following website: http://stationmeteo.meteorologic.net/metar/your-metar.php?icao=LFRS&day=070308

I want to extract data from it. I tried using file_get_contents and some regular expressions, but something is not working.

this is the code I tried:

$content=file_get_contents('http://stationmeteo.meteorologic.net/metar/your-metar.php? icao=LFMN&day=010513');

preg_match('/00\:30 07\/03\/2008(.+)01\:30 07\/03\/2008/',$content,$m);
echo $m[0];
echo $m[1];

It's giving me undefined offset 0 and 1. If I copy the content of the web page directly to $content instead of using file_get_contents, it works fine.

What am I missing?

When your using file_get_contents(...), what are your getting in $content ? — dreamweiver
– dreamweiver, Commented May 31, 2013 at 12:04
You're getting no matches because there's no timestamps that match 00:00 01/05/2013? — h2ooooooo
– h2ooooooo, Commented May 31, 2013 at 12:05
sorry I set the date wrong I mean, 00:30 07/03/2008 and 01:30 07/03/2008 — maggiemh
– maggiemh, Commented May 31, 2013 at 12:06
yes, if I echo $content, it will return the content of the website. — maggiemh
– maggiemh, Commented May 31, 2013 at 12:09

Tim Pietzcker · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-31 12:12:30Z

2

The problem is that .+ matches any characters except newlines, and there is a newline character in the text you're trying to match.

Try

preg_match('~00:30 07/03/2008(.+)01:30 07/03/2008~s',$content,$m);

(using ~ as a delimiter so you don't have to escape all those slashes, by the way)

The next question is: Why don't I get this problem when copying the contents of the webpage directly into $content? Well, all whitespace is normalized to a single space when a webpage is rendered, turning the \n that's present in the page's source code (press Ctrl-U to see it) into a simple space. And .+ matches that space.

answered May 31, 2013 at 12:12

Tim Pietzcker

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1 Comment

maggiemh Over a year ago

Ok, now I understood what was going on. and thx for the ~ delimiter tip. (really helpful)

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