load external webpage and add custom header and use the data from webpage

Question

I want to load a external webpage on my own server and add my own header. Also i need to use the data from the external website like url and content (i need to search and find specific data, check if i got that data in my system and show my data in the header). The external webpage needs to be working (like the buttons for opening other pages, no new windows).

I know i can play with .NET to create software but i want to create a website that will do the trick. Can this be done? Php + iframe is to simple i think, that won't give me the data from external website and my server won't see changes in the external url (what i need).

Answer 1

If it's supposed to be client-side, then you can acquire the data necessary by using an Ajax request, parsing it in JavaScript and then just inserting it into an element. However you have to take into account that if the host doesn't support cross-origin resource sharing , then you won't be able to do it like this.

Ajax page source request: get full html source code of page through ajax request through javascript

Parsing elements from the source: http://ajaxian.com/archives/html-parser-in-javascript (not sure if useful)

Changing the element body:

// data --> the content you want to display in your element
document.getElementById('yourElement').innerHtml = data;

Other approach (server-side though) is to "act" like a browser by faking your user-agent to some browser's and then using cUrl for example to get the source. But you don't want to fake it, because that's not nice and you would feel bad..

Hope it gets you started!