"gather file; read and report"

eastonch

Hi guys;

I'm wondering about a small coding project that could greatly help me in my organisation.
Currently at work; (McDonalds) we have this shift-scheduling system called "McTime" (don't fucking laugh). and it displays information once logged in about each day; and who's in. it displays it through the use of HTML tables, for example:
<tr> <td class="s_day_td_crew"> Pauline Robinson </td> <td class="s_day_td_crew"> 09:00-17:00 </td> </tr>

Would there be a way to be able to "strip" a html file through PHP to look for my name "Christopher Easton" then find the hour below it? It's more annoying since there's one class, not two; when it comes to the table.

I would then take the hour for that day and then output it into my own little DB; from here, be able to work out approximate pay; how long my break would be, etc. It saves me manually entering it on my Excel Spreadsheet which is too messy for me to repair how I want it to be... And something like this could be fun.

Any ideas? I've thought about maybe reading the remote file and stripping it down in an array and string replacing to just find names and times... but that seemed like alot of work, and there has to be a simpler way.

Cheers,.
Chris.

dnom

I do this sort of stuff with python but for php see:
http://php.net/manual/en/simplexmlelement.xpath.php
You can give the exact HTML and I might help you with the code if I have time to play with PHP later. But you've probably figured it out already by then

sleddog

This might be a start...

curl -s http://someURL | grep -A3 "Adam Smart"

-A3 prints 3 lines after the line with 'Adam Smart'

That should give you your times on the last line. If it does you can add tail to display only the last line...

curl -s http://someURL | grep -A3 "Adam Smart" | tail -n1

tridinebandim

what about javascript?

PhilND

Yes. Domxpath in PHP can do it.

Go look into it, awesome for making web scrapers too.

http://php.net/manual/en/class.domxpath.php

Phil

joepie91

I'm happy to see XML parsers be the first thing to be suggested, instead of regex

eastonch

Alright; quite a lot I need to take in; cheers @sleddog for the starting point; I think I'll look into using curl (I guess I could just use PHP and use the shell_exec function?

Raymii

@joepie91 said: I'm happy to see XML parsers be the first thing to be suggested, instead of regex

I always thought that bash, grep, sed and awk were parsers? :P

DimeCadmium

@eastonch said: I think I'll look into using curl (I guess I could just use PHP and use the shell_exec function?

There's a curl extension in PHP...