reading data off of a webpage being generated with php

[MrDudeMan]

I'm playing a browser based game that is written in PHP. What I'd like to do is read information off of the webpage and use it to change values in a calculator utility I've written instead of plugging the information in manually.

The problem is I have no idea how to get the values off of the page. I'm a programmer in 'conventional' languages and have next to no experience with html. I can write the app to do this in php or if there is a better route please let me know.

The attached pic is the interface to the game. All of the numbers (e.g. 1884/11800) are what I want to save to a variable somehow.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

[Ken g6]

What languages are you familiar with? If I was doing this in Perl (or most conventional languages with regular expressions), I'd look at the source, hope there were identifiable pieces of text near the numbers I wanted, and get them out with regular expressions.

In Java I might do the same, or I might try parsing the DOM. (There are some XML parser classes in Java.)

If you like functional languages, you could try XSLT, and there's a small chance it wouldn't throw you for a loop. (Although, technically, XSLT can't have loops. 😛)

Oh, and I really hope the numbers are text and not graphics. 🙂

 

[Red Squirrel]

perl or C++ is probably the easiest for this. Maybe even php. explode() is a wonderful function for parsing data.

I remember coding a "findbetween" function in C++ long time ago, that worked well too for parsing.

 

[exdeath]

Yeah regular expressions, just some simple string parsing as long as it doesn't change often. You can use the value label like "wood:"+ any closing HTML tags in the source as the marker for each value. Excel + VB would work pretty well if you wanted to port your calculator over to a spreadsheet.