Scraping using php - preg_match_all

Question

Trying to get the value of Internet Data Volume Balance - the script should echo 146.30mb

New to all these, having a look at all the tutorials.

How can this be done?

<tr >
    <td bgcolor="#F8F8F8"><div align="left"><B><FONT class="tplus_text">Account Status</FONT></B></div></td>
    <td bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div align="left"><FONT class="tplus_text">You exceeded your allowed credit.</FONT></div></td>
</tr> 

<tr >
    <td bgcolor="#F8F8F8"><div align="left"><B><FONT class="tplus_text">Period Free Time Remaining</FONT></B></div></td>
    <td bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div align="left"><FONT class="tplus_text">0:00:00 hours</FONT></div></td>
</tr> 

<tr >
    <td bgcolor="#F8F8F8"><div align="left"><B><FONT class="tplus_text">Internet Data Volume Balance</FONT></B></div></td>
    <td bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div align="left"><FONT class="tplus_text" style="text-transform:none;">146.30 MB</FONT></div></td>
</tr> 

Answer 1

PHP can interact with the DOM just like JavaScript can. This is vastly superior to parsing the markup, as most people will tell you is the wrong approach anyway:

Loading from an HTML File

// Start by creating a new document
$doc = new DOMDocument();
// I've loaded the table into an external file, and am loading it into the $doc
$doc->loadHTMLFile( 'htmlpage.html' );
// Since you have six table cells, I'm calling up all of them
$cells = $doc->getElementsByTagName("td");
// I'm grabbing the sixth cell's textContent property
echo $cells->item(5)->textContent;

This code will output "146.30 MB" to the screen.

Loading from a String

If you have the HTML stored within a string, you can load that into your document as well. We'll change the method used to load the file, into the method used to load from a string:

$str = "<table><tr><td>Foo</td></tr>...</table>";
$doc->loadHTML( $str );

We would then proceed with the same code as above to select the cells, and show their textContent in the output.

Check out the DOMDocument Class.

Answer 2

If you were willing to or have already installed phpQuery, you can use that.

phpQuery::newDocumentFileHTML('htmlpage.html');
echo pq('td:eq(6)')->text();