Parse HTML Table - PHP [closed]

Answer 1

As you're prepared to look beyond PHP, Nokogiri (Ruby) and Beautiful Soup (Python) are well-established libraries that parse HTML very well.

That doesn't imply that there are no suitable PHP libraries.

Answer 2

Take a look at the PHP HTML DOM Parser library.

To use, you can do something similar to this (not my example):

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>';

There's some tutorials, SO questions and interesting reads about the library. It seems to be pretty popular.

• http://davidwalsh.name/php-notifications
• http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/html-parsing-and-screen-scraping-with-the-simple-html-dom-library/
• Looping through a table with Simple HTML DOM
• how to print cells of a table with simple html dom

UPDATE FOR FINDING SPECIFIC TABLE IN HTML USING ABOVE LIBRARY

To find a particular table amongst many:

1. By class:

On line 465 of your scraped HTML, the table starts with a class catalog-listing, so:

foreach ($html->find('table[@class="catalog-listing"]')->find('tr') as $row) {
   // extract TD data
}

2. By instance (find 2nd table in HTML)

foreach ($html->find('table', 2)->find('tr') as $row) {
   // extract TD data
}