Open web-page, get its contents and follow a link that is in there

Question

I want to use a scripting language(Javascript, PHP) to achieve the following task.

1)I need to open a new webpage, given a URL, in a different window.

2)Find in its contents a specific link and open it in the same window.

Is this possible with Javascript? If yes, how is this possible?

PS:The first link is dynamic so I can only to hit it once in order to open it and read it. I have noticed that if I open it and then read it,using get_contents for PHP, there are some differences in the content.

Answer 1

You can you PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser to open the page and find the link you need.

An example for find all links:

// Create DOM from URL or file
$html = file_get_html('http://www.google.com/');

// Find all links 
foreach($html->find('a') as $element) 
       echo $element->href . '<br>';

The method 'find' has similar jQuery sintax. And PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser have a good documentation an examples.

Hope this help!