php scraping a meta itemprop tag

Question

I'm testing out my scraping abilities, trying to output values from any sort of tags. Coming up against something I'm unsure how to work, which is contained in a meta itemprop tag.

The source code looks like this, where I'm trying to scrape and output -0.205, under the meta itemprop tag name "priceChangePercent". (see at bottom line). *the value there is random depending on the time of day.

 <meta itemprop="name" content="USDJPY Spot Exchange Rate" /> <meta     
itemprop="url" content="https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USDJPY:CUR" />   
<meta itemprop="tickerSymbol" content="USDJPY" /> <meta  
itemprop="exchange" content="" /> <meta itemprop="price" content="111.95" 
/> <meta itemprop="priceChange" content="-0.23" /> <meta 
itemprop="priceChangePercent" content="-0.205" />

Currently in the code that is working, I'm identifying content like this:

$query = "//div[@class='change-container']";

Which works just fine.

What would I have to modify exactly? I've tried

$query = "//meta[@itemprop='priceChangePercent']";

No luck. This is coming from this url: https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USDJPY:CUR

Thanks so much.

my full code:

<?php 

  // this is yearly u.s. stock data
$doc = new DOMDocument;

// We don't want to bother with white spaces
$doc->preserveWhiteSpace = false;

 $doc->strictErrorChecking = false;
$doc->recover = true;

 $doc->loadHTMLFile('https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/USDJPY:CUR');

 $xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);

$query = "//meta[@itemprop='priceChangePercent']";

$entries = $xpath->query($query);
foreach ($entries as $entry) {
echo trim($entry->textContent);  // use `trim` to eliminate spaces


}

?>

it might be trivial, but do double quotes work? Otherwise the xpath looks right. — Scuzzy
Actually made the typo on here only, I tested it with right spelling. thanks for pointing that out though. edited post. @scuzzy I will the quotes — daytradeit
Xpath looks fine, see 3v4l.org/Bo7Fg - the error most likely is somewhere else (not in the question so far). — hakre
@scuzzy got it working with that change. wonderful! thank you. — daytradeit

Scuzzy Scuzzy · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-30T01:06:03

Taking your code sample:

echo trim($entry->textContent);

I've modified it to become:

echo trim($entry->getAttribute('content'));

your code seems to be getting the text content of the meta tag, which has no text content of it's own, only attribute content.

php scraping a meta itemprop tag

1 Answers