Trying something new... point me in the right direction?

[Donny Bahama]

Hi, everyone! I'm trying something I've never done in php before and I'd appreciate some initial guidance...

The goal is to take a web page as input, parse it to extract the (few pieces of) data I need, then output it as a .png image.

My goal in doing this is to create an image which is updated hourly (and always saved with the same name) so that I can then schedule a task on my (Pocket PC) phone that will download this image hourly (at a few minutes past the hour), saving it locally on my phone so that I can quickly/easily/instantly view an updated surf report (without connecting to the actual webpage and without the hassles of mobile browsers!)

I'm OK using strpos and substr to find and extract the data I need, but I'm not sure how to read in a file and parse it line by line. And outputting text to an image file (I hope to use another image as the background - partially for aesthetics and partly to insure known/consistent file dimensions) seems to be somewhat of a black art!

If someone would be so kind as to point me toward the right php commands I'll need to look into, I can take it from there. Thanks in advance!

[Donny Bahama]

Well, I've made good progress digging around on my own...

PHP: Select all

<?php
$i = 0;
$text = " ";
$lines = file('http://www.surfline.com/surf-report/oceanside-pier-ns-southern-california_4241/');
foreach ($lines as $line_num => $line)
{
    if (strpos($line, 'CURRENT WEATHER') >= 1) {
            $i++;
        } elseif (strpos($line, 'SUNRISE/SET') >= 1) {
            $i--;
        } elseif (strpos($line, 'SURF:') >= 1) {
            $i++;
        } elseif (strpos($line, 'PM REGIONAL OVERVIEW:') >= 1) {
            $i--;
    }

    if ($i == 1) {
        $notabs = array("\t", "\n");
        $text = $text . str_replace($notabs, "", strip_tags($line)) . " ";
    }
}
$nocr = array(" WIND: ", " AIR/WATER: ", " SURF: ");
$addcr = array("<br />\nWIND: ", "<br />\nAIR/WATER: ", "<br />\nSURF: ");
$text = str_replace($nocr, $addcr, $text);
$text = str_replace(" CURRENT WEATHER:", "CURRENT WEATHER: ", $text);
print $text;
?>

It may not be as elegant as it might be, but it's achieving the desired result...

Input

Output

Now for the part that scares me - text-to-image.