Parse html table using file_get_contents to php array

Question

I am trying to parse the table shown here into a multi-dimensional php array. I am using the following code but for some reason its returning an empty array. After searching around on the web, I found this site which is where I got the parseTable() function from. From reading the comments on that website, I see that the function works perfectly. So I'm assuming there is something wrong with the way I'm getting the HTML code from file_get_contents(). Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong?

<?php

$data = file_get_contents('http://flow935.com/playlist/flowhis.HTM');

function parseTable($html)
{
  // Find the table
  preg_match("/<table.*?>.*?<\/[\s]*table>/s", $html, $table_html);

  // Get title for each row
  preg_match_all("/<th.*?>(.*?)<\/[\s]*th>/", $table_html[0], $matches);
  $row_headers = $matches[1];

  // Iterate each row
  preg_match_all("/<tr.*?>(.*?)<\/[\s]*tr>/s", $table_html[0], $matches);

  $table = array();

  foreach($matches[1] as $row_html)
  {
    preg_match_all("/<td.*?>(.*?)<\/[\s]*td>/", $row_html, $td_matches);
    $row = array();
    for($i=0; $i<count($td_matches[1]); $i++)
    {
      $td = strip_tags(html_entity_decode($td_matches[1][$i]));
      $row[$row_headers[$i]] = $td;
    }

    if(count($row) > 0)
      $table[] = $row;
  }
  return $table;
}

$output = parseTable($data);

print_r($output);

?>

I want my output array to look something like this:

1
--> 11:33AM
--> DEV
--> IN THE DARK

2
--> 11:29AM
--> LIL' WAYNE
--> SHE WILL

3
--> 11:26AM
--> KARDINAL OFFISHALL
--> NUMBA 1 (TIDE IS HIGH)

Answer 1

Don't cripple yourself parsing HTML with regexps! Instead, let an HTML parser library worry about the structure of the markup for you.

I suggest you to check out Simple HTML DOM (http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/). It is a library specifically written to aid in solving this kind of web scraping problems in PHP. By using such a library, you can write your scraping in much less lines of codes without worrying about creating working regexps.

In principle, with Simple HTML DOM you just write something like:

$html = file_get_html('http://flow935.com/playlist/flowhis.HTM');
foreach($html->find('tr') as $row) {
   // Parse table row here
}

This can be then extended to capture your data in some format, for instance to create an array of artists and corresponding titles as:

<?php
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>';

?>

We can see that this code can be (trivially) changed to reformat the data in any other way as well.