preg_match_all regex

Question

Having issues using regex to grab HTML contained in a certain span. Trying to get it to get safeytrfyh is available! on NameMC.com to make a fast checker that will check a pre-specified list if usernames are available instead of constantly typing in the username and clicking check.

An example page you guys can use is https://namemc.com/u/safeytrfyh Im using cURL for this:

<?php
//Urls to scrape from.
$URLs = array();
$URLs[] = 'https://namemc.com/u/safeytrfyh';
$working = '';

//Curl scraper.
foreach($URLs as $URL){
$ch     = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);        
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
$page = curl_exec($ch);
$accounts = array();
preg_match_all('#<div><span[^>]*>(.*?)</span></div>#',$page,$accounts);
foreach($accounts[0] as $account){
    $working .= ''.$account.''. PHP_EOL . '';
}
}

//Put the scraped check into the new .txt file.
file_put_contents('accounts.txt', $working, FILE_APPEND);
?>

Answer 1

The usually simpler / less efficient approach is typically traversing the HTML structure with a neat frontend, such as QueryPath etc. qp($html)->find(".alert-danger .alert-link")->text() . Albeit that actually looks less reliable for the concrete task.

Now if for some reason you don't want to look at the HTML source, and adapt your regex, or don't know how placeholders work; then a simpler alternative is just matching for raw text :

$text = strip_tags($html);
preg_match_all("/(\w+) \s+ is \s+ available/x", $text, $matches);

Where \\w+ stands for word characters, \\s+ for spaces, and /x for readability.

Answer 2

You can convert page in to DOM object can get what ever you want as: 

    <?php
            $url = "http://stackoverflow.com/";
            $ch     = curl_init();
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0); //  if page is https (use if you are using local host)
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36');
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);        
            curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);

             $page = curl_exec($ch);  //  Can echo to check page 

                $dom = new DOMDocument();
                @$dom->loadHTML($page);
                $xpath = new DOMXPath( $dom );
                $query21 = '//div[@id="question-mini-list"]//h3//a[@class="question-hyperlink"]' ; 
                $nodes21 = $xpath->query( $query21 );  

                $title = "questions.txt";
                $file_title = fopen($title, 'w');

                foreach( $nodes21 as $node21 )
                  {
                    $tit = trim($node21->nodeValue);  // HEADING 
                    fwrite($file_title, $tit . "\r\n");
                   }        

    ?>

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