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up vote 1 down vote favorite

Here's an example page of what I'm trying to scrape...

[
[4056, 1, 'Saturday, Aug 18 2012', '15:00', 171],
[4057, 1, 'Saturday, Aug 18 2012', '15:00', 94],
[4058, 1, 'Saturday, Aug 18 2012', '15:00', 175],
[4059, 1, 'Saturday, Aug 18 2012', '15:00', 29],
[4051, 1, 'Saturday, Aug 18 2012', '15:00', 13],
[4053, 1, 'Saturday, Aug 18 2012', '15:00', 170],
[4055, 1, 'Saturday, Aug 18 2012', '17:30', 23],
[4060, 1, 'Sunday, Aug 19 2012', '13:30', 194],
[4054, 1, 'Sunday, Aug 19 2012', '16:00', 16],
[4052, 1, 'Monday, Aug 20 2012', '20:00', 31],
[4123, 1, 'Wednesday, Aug 22 2012', '19:45', 15]
]

Here's the code I'd normally use for something similar...

$str = file_get_contents('http://www.thewebsite.com/info/');
$jsonarray = json_decode($str, true);

$id = $jsonarray['id'];

But as you can see... that this isn't the same. Also, I don't even know if that first page is in JSON (it's a JS Array right?).

How would I scrape the individual items from this for putting into variables/array?

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4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

The data isn't valid JSON because it uses single quotes instead of double quotes to wrap strings.

If you know that the content will not contain other single quotes, other than the string wrappers then you could simply replace single with double quotes to correct the JSON format.

$fixedJSON = str_replace("'", '"', $str);
$data = json_decode($fixedJSON);

foreach($data as $row)
{
    echo $row[2]; // Saturday, Aug 18 2012
}

If the content could contain single quotes other than the string wrappers then it it will be harder to correct the JSON because you will need to only replace the wrapping quotes and handle quotes within the data which may or may not be escaped. For example double quotes will need escaping and single quotes will need the escaping removed.

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Yes.. It'll be like this every time and your solution works. Thanks for keeping it simple <3 –  Cully Jul 16 '13 at 11:46
1  
No problem :) happy coding! –  MrCode Jul 16 '13 at 12:14
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up vote 1 down vote

Sorry, an ugly solution :\ you can use str_replace also

<?php
  $str  = preg_replace( "/'(.+?)'/", '"$1"', $str );
  var_dump( json_decode( $str ) );
?>
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up vote 0 down vote

It should be:

$str = file_get_contents('http://www.thewebsite.com/info/');
$jsonarray = json_decode($str, true);

$id = $jsonarray[0][0]; // 4056
$id1 = $jsonarray[1][0]; // 4057
// etc
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But the data is not JSON, so json_decode won't work! –  Felix Kling Jul 16 '13 at 11:41
 
@Matyunin I tried this, but it doesn't work.. Doesn't pick up anything. –  Cully Jul 16 '13 at 11:44
1  
Yes, data in question is not a valid JSON, we need to use $fixedJSON = str_replace("'", '"', $str); like in first answer. –  Matyunin Jul 16 '13 at 12:42
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up vote 0 down vote

Keep the array in a variable.....

  var jsonarray = json_decode($str, true);

  var len = jsonarray.length
  for (var i=0; i<len; ++i) {
       var s = myStringArray[i];
  }
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