Google Documentation Google API Key Yahoo Documentation Yahoo API Key

So here we go. This time I made a quick PHP class with some basic functions to grab the source fo the page as well as fetchBetween, fetchAfter, fetchAll, etc. You can get the latest version of the class at http://www.bradino.com/downloads/cScrape.txt - be sure to rename it to cScrape.php. If there is an interest I can continue to develop this class a tool for screens craping with PHP.

Anyway so here we go scraping all the companies from this page http://www.newyork411.com/Ad_Agencies_Production_Companies/category-cid-50553.htm as well as the details of each company, found by clicking on the company.

Step 1 - Initialize the class and fetch the page:

Step 2 - find your anchor and get the chunk of html that contains what you want

Step 3 - parse out the individual values and print out the first record for demo

To ReplaceAll you have to do it a little differently. To replace all occurrences in the string, use the g modifier like this:

(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5)

dba_handlers() list all the handlers supported by this
extension.

Turns on/off full information display in the result. The default is
FALSE.

Returns an array of database handlers. If full_info
is set to TRUE, the array will be associative with the handlers names as
keys, and their version information as value. Otherwise, the result will be
an indexed array of handlers names.

Note:
When the internal cdb library is used you will see
cdb and cdb_make.

Example 1. dba_handlers() Example

The above example will output
something similar to:

(PHP 3, PHP 4, PHP 5)

This function scans string for matches to
pattern, then replaces the matched text
with replacement.

The modified string is returned. (Which may mean that the
original string is returned if there are no matches to be
replaced.)

If pattern contains parenthesized
substrings, replacement may contain
substrings of the form
\\digit, which will
be replaced by the text matching the digit'th parenthesized
substring; \\0 will produce the entire
contents of string. Up to nine substrings may be used.
Parentheses may be nested, in which case they are counted by the
opening parenthesis.

If no matches are found in string, then
string will be returned unchanged.

For example, the following code snippet prints "This was a test"
three times:

Example 1. ereg_replace() example

One thing to take note of is that if you use an integer value as
the replacement parameter, you may not get
the results you expect. This is because
ereg_replace() will interpret the number as
the ordinal value of a character, and apply that. For instance:

Example 2. ereg_replace() example

Example 3. Replace URLs with links

Tip:
preg_replace(), which uses a Perl-compatible
regular expression syntax, is often a faster alternative to
ereg_replace().

See also ereg(), eregi(),
eregi_replace(), str_replace(), and
preg_match().

(PHP 3, PHP 4, PHP 5)

Sends an email.

Receiver, or receivers of the mail.

The formatting of this string must comply with
RFC 2822. Some examples are:

Subject of the email to be sent.

This must not contain any newline characters, or the mail may not be
sent properly.

Message to be sent.

Each line should be separated with a LF (\n). Lines should not be larger
than 70 characters.

(Windows only) When PHP is talking to a SMTP server directly, if a full
stop is found on the start of a line, it is removed. To counter-act this,
replace these occurrences with a double dot.

String to be inserted at the end of the email header.

This is typically used to add extra headers (From, Cc, and Bcc).
Multiple extra headers should be separated with a CRLF (\r\n).

Note:
When sending mail, the mail must contain
a From header. This can be set with the
additional_headers parameter, or a default
can be set in php.ini.

Failing to do this will result in an error
message similar to Warning: mail(): "sendmail_from" not
set in php.ini or custom "From:" header missing.
The From header sets also
Return-Path under Windows.

Note:
If messages are not received, try using a LF (\n) only.
Some poor quality Unix mail transfer agents replace LF by CRLF
automatically (which leads to doubling CR if CRLF is used).
This should be a last resort, as it does not comply with
RFC 2822.

The additional_parameters parameter
can be used to pass an additional parameter to the program configured
to use when sending mail using the sendmail_path
configuration setting. For example, this can be used to set the
envelope sender address when using sendmail with the
-f sendmail option.

The user that the webserver runs as should be added as a trusted user to the
sendmail configuration to prevent a 'X-Warning' header from being added
to the message when the envelope sender (-f) is set using this method.
For sendmail users, this file is /etc/mail/trusted-users.

Returns TRUE if the mail was successfully accepted for delivery, FALSE otherwise.

It is important to note that just because the mail was accepted for delivery,
it does NOT mean the mail will actually reach the intended destination.

Example 1. Sending mail.

Using mail() to send a simple email:

Example 2. Sending mail with extra headers.

The addition of basic headers, telling the MUA
the From and Reply-To addresses:

Example 3. Sending mail with an additional command line parameter.

The additional_parameters parameter
can be used to pass an additional parameter to the program configured
to use when sending mail using the sendmail_path.

Example 4. Sending HTML email

It is also possible to send HTML email with mail().

Note:
If intending to send HTML or otherwise Complex mails, it is recommended
to use the PEAR package PEAR::Mail_Mime.

Note:
The Windows implementation of mail() differs in many
ways from the Unix implementation. First, it doesn't use a local binary
for composing messages but only operates on direct sockets which means a
MTA is needed listening on a network socket (which
can either on the localhost or a remote machine).

Second, the custom headers like
From:,
Cc:,
Bcc: and
Date: are
not interpreted by the
MTA in the first place, but are parsed by PHP.

As such, the to parameter should not be an address
in the form of "Something <someone@example.com>". The
mail command may not parse this properly while talking with
the MTA.

Note:
Email with attachments and special
types of content (e.g. HTML) can be sent using this function. This is
accomplished via MIME-encoding - for more information, see this
Zend article or the PEAR Mime Classes.

Note:
It is worth noting that the mail() function is not
suitable for larger volumes of email in a loop. This function opens
and closes an SMTP socket for each email, which is not very efficient.

For the sending of large amounts of email, see the
PEAR::Mail, and
PEAR::Mail_Queue packages.

Note:
The following RFCs may be useful:
RFC 1896,
RFC 2045,
RFC 2046,
RFC 2047,
RFC 2048,
RFC 2049, and
RFC 2822.

(PHP 3, PHP 4, PHP 5)

Returns string with '<br />' inserted
before all newlines.

Note:
Starting with PHP 4.0.5, nl2br() is now XHTML
compliant. All versions before 4.0.5 will return
string with '<br>' inserted before
newlines instead of '<br />'.

Example 1. using nl2br()

this will output :

See also htmlspecialchars(),
htmlentities(),
wordwrap(), and
str_replace().

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

This function will turn output buffering on. While output
buffering is active no output is sent from the script (other than
headers), instead the output is stored in an internal buffer.

The contents of this internal buffer may be copied into a string
variable using ob_get_contents(). To output
what is stored in the internal buffer, use
ob_end_flush(). Alternatively,
ob_end_clean() will silently discard the
buffer contents.

An optional output_callback function may
be specified. This function takes a string as a parameter and
should return a string. The function will be called when
ob_end_flush() is called, or when the output
buffer is flushed to the browser at the end of the request. When
output_callback is called, it will receive
the contents of the output buffer as its parameter and is
expected to return a new output buffer as a result, which will be
sent to the browser. If the output_callback is not
a callable function, this function will return FALSE.
If the callback function has two parameters, the second parameter is filled
with a bit-field consisting of
PHP_OUTPUT_HANDLER_START,
PHP_OUTPUT_HANDLER_CONT and
PHP_OUTPUT_HANDLER_END.
If output_callback returns FALSE original input
is sent to the browser.

Note:
In PHP 4.0.4, ob_gzhandler() was introduced
to facilitate sending gz-encoded data to web browsers that
support compressed web pages. ob_gzhandler()
determines what type of content encoding the browser will accept
and will return its output accordingly.

Note:
Before PHP 4.3.2 this function did not return FALSE in case the passed
output_callback can not be executed.

Some web servers (e.g. Apache) change the working directory of a script
when calling the callback function. You can change it back by e.g.
chdir(dirname($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'])) in the
callback function.

If the optional parameter chunk_size is passed, the
callback function is called on every first newline after
chunk_size bytes of output.
The output_callback parameter may be bypassed by
passing a NULL value.

If the optional parameter erase is set to FALSE,
the buffer will not be deleted until the script finishes (as of PHP 4.3.0).

Output buffers are stackable, that is, you may call
ob_start() while another
ob_start() is active. Just make
sure that you call ob_end_flush()
the appropriate number of times. If multiple output callback
functions are active, output is being filtered sequentially
through each of them in nesting order.

ob_end_clean(),
ob_end_flush(), ob_clean(),
ob_flush() and ob_start()
may not be called from a callback function. If you call them from
callback function, the behavior is undefined. If you would like to
delete the contents of a buffer, return "" (a null string) from callback
function.
You can't even call functions using the output buffering functions like
print_r($expression, true) or
highlight_file($filename, true) from a callback
function.

Example 1. User defined callback function example

<html>
<body>
<p>It's like comparing apples to oranges.</p>
</body>
</html>

Would produce:

See also ob_get_contents(),
ob_end_flush(),
ob_end_clean(),
ob_implicit_flush(),
ob_gzhandler(), ob_iconv_handler()
mb_output_handler(), and
ob_tidyhandler().

(PHP 5)

This function returns a string or an array with all occurrences of
search in subject
(ignoring case) replaced with the given replace
value. If you don't need fancy replacing rules, you should generally
use this function instead of eregi_replace() or
preg_replace() with the i modifier.

If subject is an array, then the search
and replace is performed with every entry of
subject, and the return value is an array
as well.

If search and
replace are arrays, then
str_ireplace() takes a value from each array
and uses them to do search and replace on
subject. If
replace has fewer values than
search, then an empty string is used for
the rest of replacement values. If search
is an array and replace is a string; then
this replacement string is used for every value of
search.

Example 1. str_ireplace() example

This function is binary safe.

Note:
As of PHP 5.0.0 the number of matched and replaced
needles will be returned in
count which is passed by reference.
Prior to PHP 5.0.0 this parameter is not available.

See also:
str_replace(),
preg_replace(), and
strtr().