Extract content showed by IFrame, saving it in database

**Dormilich** · Apr 19 '10, 08:12 AM

the content of an iframe is a website of its own.

**Atli** · Apr 19 '10, 09:44 AM

Hey.

It may be easier to just pull the contents of the website being displayed in the <iframe> and parse it from there in PHP. You could use Curl or possibly just file_get_conten ts to pull the website, and then go through it with DOM or even SimpleXML. (Valid HTML can usually be parsed as XML)

If you need to do this using the <iframe>, you would need to use JavaScript.

**Axirius** · Apr 19 '10, 10:47 PM

Hi and thanks both Atli and Dormilich for your answer,

I´m newbie regarding web programming, actually the web I´ll trying to build is using Joomla, but I´ve learned some things about html, php so far in the process. But I don´t have enough knowledge yet to do this specific task on my own.

I´ve followed information from links you gave me (php.net) and I´ve tried some example codes about "file" and "file_get_conte nt" functions, but I don´t know how to get the text content that is inside the IFrame which is seen by visitors. What I get is as follow:

1 -) Using the following code with "file_get_conten ts" function, the script loads the entire site as I would surf its URL directly in web browser.

Code using "file_get_conten ts" function:

Code:

<?php
if( false == ($Content=file_get_contents( 'http://www.mywebsite.com' )))
    echo "Could not read file.";
  else
    echo "File contents: $Content";
?>

2 -) Using the following code with "file" function, the script looks like loads the HTML code of the page, but in the part where I was expecting or which is supposed to show the text contained within IFrame, It only shows the IFrame Script. I mean:

Code using "file" function:

Code:

<?php
// Get a file into an array.  In this example we'll go through HTTP to get
// the HTML source of a URL.
$lines = file('http://www.mywebsite.com/');

// Loop through our array, show HTML source as HTML source; and line numbers too.
foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line) {
    echo "Line #<b>{$line_num}</b> : " . htmlspecialchars($line) . "<br />\n";

Result: HTML code, and only IFrame code.

Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> 
 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-gb" lang="en-gb">
 <head>
[B].
.
. [/B]
[B]<iframe id="Iframe_title" frameborder="0" style="width:400px; height:150px;" src="/" allowtransparency="true"></iframe>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.source-of-iframe.com/js/Iframe_title.js?p=328&s=1&l=3&h=www.source-of-iframe.com"></script>[/B] 

</div>
[B].
.
.[/B]
</body> 
</html>

Maybe somebody has done something similar before to give me some tips or a kind of example on how to follow.

Many thanks in advance for any help.

Best regards,

**Dormilich** · Apr 19 '10, 11:19 PM

it may well be that the iframe only contains a script, which is responsible for creating the HTML content. in this case you can’t do anything about it, since PHP does not execute JavaScript.

**Axirius** · Apr 19 '10, 11:35 PM

Thanks Dormilich for reply,

Well, if it not possible to extract the HTML content within the IFrame with PHP, how could be possible using javascript to run a script within some location inside the server?

Is there some place where can I see similar examples regarding this?.

I´ve searched in search engines without get what I´m looking for yet, maybe due I´m not using the correct word concepts or searching in the wrong programming language.

Many thanks again.

Best regards,

Extract content showed by IFrame, saving it in database

Extract content showed by IFrame, saving it in database

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment