Parse html table using file_get_contents to php array

Question

I am trying to parse the table shown here into a multi-dimensional php array. I am using the following code but for some reason its returning an empty array. After searching around on the web, I found this site which is where I got the parseTable() function from. From reading the comments on that website, I see that the function works perfectly. So I'm assuming there is something wrong with the way I'm getting the HTML code from file_get_contents(). Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong?

<?php

$data = file_get_contents('http://flow935.com/playlist/flowhis.HTM');

function parseTable($html)
{
  // Find the table
  preg_match("/<table.*?>.*?<\/[\s]*table>/s", $html, $table_html);

  // Get title for each row
  preg_match_all("/<th.*?>(.*?)<\/[\s]*th>/", $table_html[0], $matches);
  $row_headers = $matches[1];

  // Iterate each row
  preg_match_all("/<tr.*?>(.*?)<\/[\s]*tr>/s", $table_html[0], $matches);

  $table = array();

  foreach($matches[1] as $row_html)
  {
    preg_match_all("/<td.*?>(.*?)<\/[\s]*td>/", $row_html, $td_matches);
    $row = array();
    for($i=0; $i<count($td_matches[1]); $i++)
    {
      $td = strip_tags(html_entity_decode($td_matches[1][$i]));
      $row[$row_headers[$i]] = $td;
    }

    if(count($row) > 0)
      $table[] = $row;
  }
  return $table;
}

$output = parseTable($data);

print_r($output);

?>

I want my output array to look something like this:

1
--> 11:33AM
--> DEV
--> IN THE DARK

2
--> 11:29AM
--> LIL' WAYNE
--> SHE WILL

3
--> 11:26AM
--> KARDINAL OFFISHALL
--> NUMBA 1 (TIDE IS HIGH)

-1 for lack of effort. Isolate your problem instead of basically posting a huge block of code and asking people to figure out what's wrong and fix it. — NullUserException
– NullUserException, Commented Nov 27, 2011 at 16:50
This minimal reproducible example has been destroyed by consequence of the sample input link being dead. — mickmackusa
– mickmackusa ♦, Commented Nov 7, 2023 at 0:31

starball · Accepted Answer · 2022-12-27 03:30:48Z

51

Don't cripple yourself parsing HTML with regexps! Instead, let an HTML parser library worry about the structure of the markup for you.

I suggest you to check out Simple HTML DOM (http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/). It is a library specifically written to aid in solving this kind of web scraping problems in PHP. By using such a library, you can write your scraping in much less lines of code without worrying about creating working regexps.

In principle, with Simple HTML DOM you just write something like:

$html = file_get_html('http://flow935.com/playlist/flowhis.HTM');
foreach($html->find('tr') as $row) {
   // Parse table row here
}

This can be then extended to capture your data in some format, for instance to create an array of artists and corresponding titles as:

<?php
require('simple_html_dom.php');

$table = array();

$html = file_get_html('http://flow935.com/playlist/flowhis.HTM');
foreach($html->find('tr') as $row) {
    $time = $row->find('td',0)->plaintext;
    $artist = $row->find('td',1)->plaintext;
    $title = $row->find('td',2)->plaintext;

    $table[$artist][$title] = true;
}

echo '<pre>';
print_r($table);
echo '</pre>';

?>

We can see that this code can be (trivially) changed to reformat the data in any other way as well.

edited Dec 27, 2022 at 3:30

starball♦

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answered Nov 27, 2011 at 16:53

jsalonen

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6 Comments

Farhan Ahmad Over a year ago

That worked perfectly. But I need to make a multi dimensional array as shown at the bottom of the original question.

jsalonen Over a year ago

Did you check out example "Scraping Slashdot!" from the simplehtmldom site? As far as I understand it answer to that question.

jsalonen Over a year ago

Ok I added a further example, but this is as far as I will go. I will leave the rest for you to figure out.

Farhan Ahmad Over a year ago

Yes I figured it out. Thanks for the further example.

jsalonen Over a year ago

Using simplehtmldom instead of rexexps is fun, isn't it? :)

|

John Ballinger · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-25 11:57:21Z

22

I tried simple_html_dom but on larger files and on repeat calls to the function I am getting zend_mm_heap_corrupted on php 5.3 (GAH). I have also tried preg_match_all (but this has been failing on a larger file (5000) lines of html, which was only about 400 rows of my HTML table.

I am using this and its working fast and not spitting errors.

$dom = new DOMDocument();  

//load the html  
$html = $dom->loadHTMLFile("htmltable.html");  

  //discard white space   
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;   

  //the table by its tag name  
$tables = $dom->getElementsByTagName('table');   


    //get all rows from the table  
$rows = $tables->item(0)->getElementsByTagName('tr');   
  // get each column by tag name  
$cols = $rows->item(0)->getElementsByTagName('th');   
$row_headers = NULL;
foreach ($cols as $node) {
    //print $node->nodeValue."\n";   
    $row_headers[] = $node->nodeValue;
}   

$table = array();
  //get all rows from the table  
$rows = $tables->item(0)->getElementsByTagName('tr');   
foreach ($rows as $row)   
{   
   // get each column by tag name  
    $cols = $row->getElementsByTagName('td');   
    $row = array();
    $i=0;
    foreach ($cols as $node) {
        # code...
        //print $node->nodeValue."\n";   
        if($row_headers==NULL)
            $row[] = $node->nodeValue;
        else
            $row[$row_headers[$i]] = $node->nodeValue;
        $i++;
    }   
    $table[] = $row;
}   

var_dump($table);

This code worked well for me. Example of original code is here.

http://techgossipz.blogspot.co.nz/2010/02/how-to-parse-html-using-dom-with-php.html

answered May 25, 2012 at 11:57

John Ballinger

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2 Comments

Oleg Abrazhaev Over a year ago

you should do array_shift($table) because first element will be [0] => array(0) { } empty. it's because you get all tr tags in $rows including the one with th tags. I will suggest an edit.

Tony Over a year ago

I am using DOM with PHP 5.6.31, but found that the result of $rows = $tables->item(0)->getElementsByTagName('tr') does not contain any <td> tags for a subsequent $cols = $row->getElementsByTagName('td'). Any idea why my first call to getElementsByTagName() appears to be stripping the HTML tags?

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