I'm using PHP, also a complete noob at it.
So I have this URL that takes queries and returns a data file with some matches.
Say www.example.com/search?q=$query where $query is whatever the search term is.
However when you go to the URL in your browser it downloads a text file with the information in it.
I want to run through the whole alphabet and every combination of letters up to 10 letters and extract the data from all the returned files and store it in a database.
I'm not exactly sure how to go about opening each URL from the PHP script. Is there a better way to do this than downloading each file and extracting the info then deleting the file?
What I have below doesn't work at all.
$alphabet = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
for ($i=0; $i<=25; $i++){
$query = $alphabet[$i];
$url = "www.example.com/search?q=$query";
$html = fopen($url);
$stringify = (string)$html;
echo $stringify;
}
You can't just open a file from an URL. You need to use an HTTP client library in order to get the files. This link may come in handy: HTTP Client Library for PHP
EDIT: based on alex's comment, you may want to check allow_url_fopen
in your php.ini
file.