Can I parse the directory listing of an external webpage?

Question

Is it possible to parse the directory listing of a webpage which is external given the webpage is accessible and it shows a list of the files when I access it. I only want to know is it possible to parse the files dynamically in PHP and how? -thank you

Sorry for being not clear. I mean a directory listing such as: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/ (Index of /..) and ability to read the content as array or something easy to manipulate in my script

Answer 1

You can use preg_match or DomDocument

For your case:

$contents = file_get_contents("http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/");
preg_match_All("|href=[\"'](.*?)[\"']|", $contents, $hrefs);
var_dump($hrefs);

If you want to take a look at a working demo.

Answer 2

If you're getting a directory listing back that is full of links in a proper XHTML document you can use DOMDocument, and code such as the following to get back a list of files:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->preserveWhitespace = false;
$doc->load('directorylisting.html');

$files = $doc->getElementsByTagName('a');

$files is now a list of DOMElements that you can iterate through and get the href attribute to get a full path to the files in the listing.

Note that this approach requires a properly formed directory listing returned from the server. You cannot, for example, do a request on stackoverflow.com and get a directory listing of the files.

If this doesn't work (perhaps malformed HTML) you could use Regular Expressions (eg. preg_match_all) to find <a tags, like such:

preg_match_all('@<a href\="([a-zA-Z\.\-\_\/ ]*)">(.*)</a>@', file_get_contents('http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/'), $files);
var_dump($files);

$files would still be matched elements, just a set of arrays.

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UPDATE, I tested with your URL (http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/) and it works fine (the preg_match_all method).