Help With Screen Scraping (Need To Find Date On Page)

[eluser]Jay Logan[/eluser]
Thanks for all the help. This is what I ended up doing.

First, needed to get rid of all new line characters and any characters that create white space.

Code:

$html = file_get_html($this->input->post('url'));
$new_lines = array("\t","\n","\r");
$content = str_replace($new_lines, "", html_entity_decode($html));

Next I find the first instance of a certain pattern (code where the date and time is displayed).

Code:

preg_match("|<hr>(.*)<br>|U", $content, $raw_date);

Then I remove the text/code before the date & time that I don't need.

Code:

$format_date_front = str_replace('<hr>Date: ', '', $raw_date[0]);
$format_date_back = str_replace('<br>', '', $format_date_front);

And finally I separate the date and time to insert in separate database fields.

Code:

$date_time = explode(', ', $format_date_back);
$date = trim($date_time[0]);
$time = trim($date_time[1]);

And the final code (with other stuff) ends up giving me a pretty awesome tool that lets me simply paste the link of a Craig's List and insert data from the post into my database - creating a nice list of all my posts from several different accounts. I track hits, posting duration, clicks to inserted links, ad status, and other stuff. CI is the best.