Feb 21 2011

get MySpace events with a PHP function

Category: Php,Spiders & web bots — Giulio Pons @ 12:41 pm

Here is a function to read the concerts for a myspace band page. This code retrieves the “shows page” for a specified myspace username, and than parse the html to find and decode data.

Since myspace returns a page in Italian (this probably depends on geographic ip translations) the fnction uses a months array in italian. Probably you should change this, or you can try to make it better by adding some header to curl to specify the language of the page (I think it’s possible).

You can watch a DEMO here.

function myspaceConcerts($user) {
	$ch = curl_init("http://www.myspace.com/".$user."/shows");
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, TRUE);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, FALSE);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, FALSE);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, FALSE);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "");
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 4);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; he; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8");
	$page = curl_exec($ch);
	// look for band name
	preg_match_all("#<a class=\"userLink\" href=\"/".$user."\">(.*)</a>#Us", $page, $a);
	$band = trim(strip_tags($a[1][0]));
	//
	// months array is in italian because from my web server pages come in italian
	// probably you have to change this array to match myspace response
	$months = array("gen"=>"01","feb"=>"02","mar"=>"03","apr"=>"04","mag"=>"05","giu"=>"06","lug"=>"07","ago"=>"08","set"=>"09","ott"=>"10","nov"=>"11","dic"=>"12");
	$out = array();
	$c=0;	// concerts counter
	$li = preg_split("/<li class=\"moduleItem event( odd| even)?( first| last)? vevent\" ?>/i",$page);
	for($i=0;$i<count($li);$i++) {
		if(stristr($li[$i],"<div class=\"entryDate\">")) {
			// find date
			preg_match_all("#<span class=\"month\">(.*)</span>#Us", $li[$i], $temp);
			$month = $months[strip_tags(trim($temp[1][0]))];
			preg_match_all("#<span class=\"day\">(.*)</span>#Us", $li[$i], $temp);
			$day = str_pad( strip_tags(trim($temp[1][0])), 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);
			$year = date("Y");
			$data = $year."-".$month."-".$day;
			if($data<date("Y-m-d")) { $data = (date("Y")+1)."-".$month."-".$day; }

			// find venue
			preg_match_all("#<h4>(.*)</h4>#Us", $li[$i], $temp);
			$posto = strip_tags(trim($temp[1][0]));
			preg_match_all("#<span class=\"locality\">(.*)</span>#Us", $li[$i], $temp);

			// find city
			$citta = strip_tags(trim($temp[1][0]));
			preg_match_all("#<span class=\"region\">(.*)</span>#Us", $li[$i], $temp);

			// find region
			$region = strip_tags(trim($temp[1][0]));
			preg_match_all("#<span class=\"country-name\">(.*)</span>#Us", $li[$i], $temp);

			// find country
			$stato = strip_tags(trim($temp[1][0]));

			// build output array
			$out[$c]["band"] = $band;
			$out[$c]["date"] = $data;
			//$out[$c]["time"] = ""; not parsed
			$out[$c]["venue"] = $posto;
			//$out[$c]["url"] = ""; not parsed
			$out[$c]["where"] = $citta.",".$region.",".$stato;
			$c++;
		}
	}
	return $out;
}

This function is included in the Mini Bot Class with many other small spiders.

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Jan 20 2010

New version of Mini Bots PHP Class (v.1.4)

Category: Php,Spiders & web bots — Giulio Pons @ 11:53 pm

I’ve added three more bots to the Mini Bots Php Class, now the version number is 1.4 and it has these new features.

Follow the link, watch demos and download the class from the Mini Bots Php Class page:

  1. addeded twitterInfo method to retrieve the numbers of following, followers, and lists.
  2. addeded url2pdf method to convert and save locally a page to a pdf (thanks to pdfmyurl.com service).
  3. addeded webpage2txt method to extract all the text from a url, stripping html but also scripts and styles.

What else do you need? Suggest some usefull small bots. Comment to suggest.

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Jan 16 2010

PHP Web page to text function

Category: Php,Spiders & web bots — Giulio Pons @ 2:55 pm

I’ve found this nice small bot on the www.php.net site, thanks to the author of the script on the preg_replace page.
This bot returns the text content of a url and it could be used to take text from a site and find relevant words to search.

It’s nice because it uses CURL and let us see some nice stuff that CURL does:

  1. hide himself presenting with a specific user agent, to seem a browser and not a spider
  2. follows redirect (this means that you can call this function with a tiny url to retrieve the text in the real page!)
  3. use very powerful regular expression to remove html tags, but also javascript and styles (they remain if you simply do a strip_tags)

This script will be included in the next version of the Mini Bots PHP Class.

function webpage2txt($url) {
	$user_agent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)";

	$ch = curl_init();    // initialize curl handle
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); // set url to post to
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1);              // Fail on errors
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);    // allow redirects
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1); // return into a variable
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PORT, 80);            //Set the port number
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15); // times out after 15s

	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent);

	$document = curl_exec($ch);

	$search = array('@<script[^>]*?>.*?</script>@si',  // Strip out javascript
		'@<style[^>]*?>.*?</style>@siU',    // Strip style tags properly
		'@<[\/\!]*?[^<>]*?>@si',            // Strip out HTML tags
		'@<![\s\S]*?–[ \t\n\r]*>@',         // Strip multi-line comments including CDATA
		'/\s{2,}/',
	);

	$text = preg_replace($search, "\n", html_entity_decode($document));

	$pat[0] = "/^\s+/";
	$pat[2] = "/\s+\$/";
	$rep[0] = "";
	$rep[2] = " ";

	$text = preg_replace($pat, $rep, trim($text));

	return $text;
}

echo webpage2txt("http://www.rockit.it");
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