PHP DZone Story Information Grabber

By  on  

Having a user submit a post to DZone is great for several reasons:

  • A reader thinks enough of what you wrote to want to share it with others.
  • Your blog gets more readership.
  • Your blog revenue increases.
  • The inlink and traffic boost improve your search engine rank and Alexa ranks.
  • The new visitors may post comments, which may enhance your article.

Surely there are numerous more. Thus, it's important to keep track of the information about your article provided by DZone. Luckily, using some quick PHP code, you can grab relevant information right from DZone. All you need to know is the DZone URL that features your article.

The Code

/* step 1:  download the page content */
$dzone_content = file_get_contents('http://www.dzone.com/links/f_programming_fast_guide.html');

/* step 2:  parse it! */
$votes_up = get_match('/class="ldStats-up">(.*)<\/li>/isU',$dzone_content);
$votes_down = get_match('/class="ldStats-down">(.*)<\/li>/isU',$dzone_content);
$views = get_match('/class="ldStats-views">(.*)<\/li>/isU',$dzone_content);
$clicks = get_match('/class="ldStats-clicks">(.*)<\/li>/isU', $dzone_content);

/* step 3:  echo */
echo 'Up Votes: ',$votes_up,'<br />';
echo 'Down Votes: ',$votes_down,'<br />';
echo 'Views: ',$views,'<br />';
echo 'Clicks: ',$clicks,'<br />';

/* helper:  does regex */
function get_match($regex,$content)
{
	preg_match($regex,$content,$matches);
	return $matches[1];
}

One note: each usage of this script increments DZone's "views" stat, so if you plan on keeping accurate statistics, record the number of requests to the page and subtract that from the total.

Recent Features

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing MooTools HeatMap

    It's often interesting to think about where on a given element, whether it be the page, an image, or a static DIV, your users are clicking.  With that curiosity in mind, I've created HeatMap: a MooTools class that allows you to detect, load, save, and...

  • By
    dat.gui:  Exceptional JavaScript Interface Controller

    We all love trusted JavaScript frameworks like MooTools, jQuery, and Dojo, but there's a big push toward using focused micro-frameworks for smaller purposes. Of course, there are positives and negatives to using them.  Positives include smaller JS footprint (especially good for mobile) and less cruft, negatives...

Discussion

  1. I added some lines for those who are behind a proxy, also you have an extra on line 8 but this is a good one to track your posts on DZone :)

    /* step 1: download the page content */
    $default_opts = array(‘http’=>array(
    ‘method’=>”GET”,
    ‘header’=>”Accept-language: en\r\n” . “Cookie: foo=bar”,
    ‘proxy’=>”tcp://http-proxy.mycompany.com:80″));
    $def = stream_context_get_default($default_opts);
    $dzone_content = file_get_contents(‘http://www.dzone.com/links/f_programming_fast_guide.html’);
    
    /* step 2: parse it! */
    $votes_up = get_match(‘/class=”ldStats-up”>(.*)/isU’, $dzone_content);
    $votes_down = get_match(‘/class=”ldStats-down”>(.*)/isU’, $dzone_content);
    $views = get_match(‘/(.*)/isU’, $dzone_content);
    $clicks = get_match(‘/(.*)/isU’, $dzone_content);
    
    /* step 3: echo */
    echo ‘Up Votes: ‘,$votes_up,”;
    echo ‘Down Votes: ‘,$votes_down,”;
    echo ‘Views: ‘,$views,”;
    echo ‘Clicks: ‘,$clicks,”;
    
    /* helper: does regex */
    function get_match($regex, $content){
    preg_match($regex, $content, $matches);
    return $matches[1];
    }
    

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!