Another PHP simple DOM selection

I have touched on PHP Simple HTML DOM parser before, its useful to grab data from websites where no API is available. It’s actually one of the many methods.. such as using native PHP DOM document or cURL which I will show in this post combined with PHP simple DOM.

The idea was to get the water level for reservoir/s and the date it was updated. Firstly a function utilizing cURL to get the webpage contents:

function get_html($url)
{
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.A.B.C Safari/525.13");
    $data = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return str_get_html($data);
}

This returns the URL in HTML format

Now just using the find method with selectors to pinpoint that data:

$html = get_html('https://theurl.com/page');
$level = $html->find('tr.capacityPercentage td', 0)->innertext;
$updated = $html->find('span.value', 0)->innertext;

This is the pure html for the section of the page i was interested in:

            

                Water Storage Levels
            
            
            

        

    

        Last Updated
        25/02/2019
    
    


    

        

            

                
53.2%
                

            
            

                
51.0%
                

            
            

                
49.4%
                

            
            

                
45.8%
                

            
            

                
42.9%
                

            
        
        

            
Oct
            
Nov
            
Dec
            
Jan
            
Feb
        
    

    
    

        

                

                    
Current Volume
                    
130785
                
                

                    
% of Capacity
                    
42.93
                
                

                    
Capacity (ML)
                    
304651
                
        
    
    

 
 
To get the water level percent (42.93) i filtered 
  with class of “capacityPercentage” and the inner text of the first (0)  child. 
For the updated date (25/02/2019); The inner text of the first (0)  with a class of “value” .
 
You can read more on PHP Simple DOM selectors here.