Myspace Gigs Parser

Update: This PHP class that I built has gained a little momentum on the interweb. If anyone has actually used this class on their site and would like to have a link back from us here at DCSHB.com then feel free to email the webmaster for details.

Addendum: If you're mildly famous (or the webmaster for someone who is) and use this PHP class then please consider signing, scanning and emailing the webmaster an 8x10 headshot signed "Dave Coulier Shaves his Balls".

Thousands of bands, musicians, DJs and comedians maintain their concert calendars through their Myspace pages. Unfortunately, Myspace has never offered any form an an API to get access at any of their data. So, that makes people like me come up with creative ways to pull and parse publicly available Myspace pages in order to populate our sites.

Therefore, I have come up with a simple utilitarian PHP class to pull and parse someone's Myspace page. The Myspace Gigs Parser is simple to use, all you need is the simple Myspace URL for the band or comedian you wish to parse, e.g. http://www.myspace.com/bobsaget. You pass the URL to the class and out comes an array of all the Upcoming Gigs.

To test this parser you can try some of the links below or type in the last part of the Myspace URL into the text box in the upper right corner. Try your band's page or try your favorite band.

Examples:

• Bob Saget
• Muse
• The Almost
• Rilo Kiley
• Fall Out Boy
• Atreyu
• Avenged Sevenfold

Let's show you a quick example of how to utilize the the PHP Myspace Gigs Parser

$url = "http://www.myspace.com/bobsaget";
$gigs_parser = new Myspace_Gigs_Parser($url);
var_dump($gigs_parser->gigs);

The gigs array will either contain all the gigs parsed off that Myspace page, or bool(false). To utilize, just use a foreach() loop and

foreach($gigs_parser->gigs as $gig){
  $time = $gig[0] . ' ' . $gig[1];
  echo date('D, j M Y g:iA', strtotime($time));
  echo '<br />';
  echo $gig[2]; echo '<br />';
  echo $gig[3]; echo '<br />';
}

The data comes in an array and these are the following pertinent indexes.

[0] month day year of gig, format: date('M j Y')
[1] time of gig, format: date('g:iA')
[2] venue of gig
[3] city state of gig

That is pretty much all you need to know about how to use the Myspace Gigs Parser. Just keep one thing in mind when utilizing this class, I built it quickly so don't be critical of how I did my parsing. The only thing I regret is that I didn't notice that have a div with the id of "profile_bandschedule". I could have perhaps cut down some of the string searching time by finding that node first and searching from there. The other thing that could be improved is the final algorithm loops through all data nodes and splits them up into batches of four. This could probably be done quicker with some simple math and array_split() but I chose not waste my time any more than I already have.

And now, what you all have been waiting for... the source code:

<?php /* Provided free of charge by DaveCoulierShavesHisBalls.com Distribute this class all you want but please keep this credit intact Questions and concerns, please email webmaster@davecouliershaveshisballs.com WARNING: This class requires http wrappers for fread() so file_get_contents() will work appropriately when pulling the URL. See parse(). */ class Myspace_Gigs_Parser{ var $contents; var $gigs; function Myspace_Gigs_Parser($url = false){ if($url){ $this->parse($url); } } function parse($url = false){ $this->contents = ''; if($url){ $this->contents = file_get_contents($url); } if(strlen($this->contents) > 0){ /* Pattern match to find the beginning of the table, the weirdest inconsistency was the bordercolor and bgcolor attributes would alternate between caps and no caps for the letters in the hex codes. */ $pattern = '<table bordercolor="#[0-9A-Za-z]*" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="[0-9]*" bgcolor="#[0-9A-Za-z]*" border="0">'; $match = array(); preg_match($pattern, $this->contents, $match); /* Found the start of the Upcoming Gigs table, now substr it out so we can focus our attention to it */ $start = strpos($this->contents, "<{$match[0]}>"); if($start !== false){ $first = substr($this->contents, $start); $html = strpos($first, "<br>"); $xhtml = strpos($first, "<br />"); $end = ($html < $xhtml ? $html : $xhtml); $gigs = substr($first, 0, $end); /* strip extra tags tags and attributes */ $gigs = $this->strip_selected_tags($gigs, '<font><a><span>'); $gigs = $this->strip_selected_attributes($gigs, 'width, bgcolor, align, cellspacing, cellpadding, border, style, class, bordercolor'); /* Find all content within a <td></td> tag */ $tds = array(); $tag = 'td'; $pattern = "%(<$tag.*?>)(.*?)(<\/$tag.*?>)%is"; preg_match_all($pattern, $gigs, $tds); /* Reset gigs to an array and strip out extra garbage tags and white space */ $gigs = array(); foreach($tds[2] as $data){ $gigs[] = trim($this->strip_whitespace(strip_tags($data))); } /* Slice out td's that contained "Upcoming Gigs" and empty string which which we got from empty <td></td> in header table. */ $output = array_slice($gigs, 2); /* Simple algorithm to push every 4 items onto a return array in this form... [0] month day year of gig, format: date('M j Y') [1] time of gig [2] venue of gig [3] city state of gig */ $gigs = array(); $one_gig = array(); for($i = 0; $i < count($output); $i++){ if($i % 4 == 1){ /* Tack on the M so strtotime() will calc properly */ $output[$i] = $output[$i] . 'M'; } $one_gig[] = $output[$i]; if($i % 4 == 3){ $gigs[] = $one_gig; $one_gig = array(); } } $this->gigs = $gigs; } else{ $this->gigs = false; return false; } } } function strip_selected_tags($str, $tags = "", $stripContent = false) { preg_match_all("/<([^>]+)>/i", $tags, $allTags, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER); foreach ($allTags[1] as $tag) { $replace = "%(<$tag.*?>)(.*?)(<\/$tag.*?>)%is"; if ($stripContent) { $str = preg_replace($replace,'',$str); } $str = preg_replace($replace,'${2}',$str); } return $str; } function strip_selected_attributes($str, $attributes = ""){ $all_attributes = explode(',', $attributes); foreach ($all_attributes as $attribute) { $attribute = trim($attribute); $pattern = "!\s$attribute=s*\"[#-_:\s\w]*\"!"; $str = preg_replace($pattern,'',$str); } return $str; } function strip_whitespace($str) { $r = preg_replace('/[\n\r\t]+/', ' ', $str); return preg_replace('/\s{2,}/', ' ', $r); } } ?>