crawling a html page using php?

Question

This website lists over 250 courses in one list. I want to get the name of each course and insert that into my mysql database using php. The courses are listed like this:

<td> computer science</td>
<td> media studeies</td>
…

Is there a way to do that in PHP, instead of me having a mad data entry nightmare?

Answer 1

Regular expressions work well.

$page = // get the page
$page = preg_split("/\n/", $page);
for ($text in $page) {
    $matches = array();
    preg_match("/^<td>(.*)<\/td>$/", $text, $matches);
    // insert $matches[1] into the database
}

See the documentation for preg_match.

Answer 2

How to parse HTML has been asked and answered countless times before. While (for your specific UseCase) Regular Expressions will work, it is - in general - better and more reliable to use a proper parser for this task. Below is how to do it with DOM:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTMLFile('http://courses.westminster.ac.uk/CourseList.aspx');
foreach($dom->getElementsByTagName('td') as $title) {
    echo $title->nodeValue;
}

For inserting the data into MySql, you should use the mysqli extension. Examples are plentiful on StackOverflow. so please use the search function.