There are many ways for Extracting or fetching desired data or content from an html pages. During my work, i had to build a Miner to get news from multiple sites & update a wordpress blog with the latest news, daily.I had many choices to accomplish this task, few of them are
- Regular expressions
- PHP string functions.
- Using DOM Parsing
- Using Xpath.

First of all i used regular expressions to extract data from a static html page.Which was really a nightmare for me.As there is not proper structure of page, it was really hard to extract news from specific tags.Some of them were in Div,some were in TD & others in Li tags. After a long effort i couldn’t extract data using regular expressions.
I thought to use some html parser, some of them are available on internet.I used it to get data of my choice, even it couldn’t get desired data, becuase of complexity of structure of page.After that i tried to use PHP string functions, like str_replace,Trim etc, to replace specific tags with known id, so that parsing can get easy. But still, to get desired content, it was really a mess to get to them.

Finally i used firebug to analyze the content of the page, to see the content holders, during which, i cam to find exact XPath location of desired content holder.
XPath (XML Path Language) is a language for selecting nodes from an XML document. In addition, XPath may be used to compute values (strings, numbers, or boolean values) from the content of an XML document. but i wasn’t aware that Xpath can also be used with html pages, to parse the DOM tree of page.

finally, i got the exact path of Content holder, which had the latest news, daily updated. And i grabbed all the content from it.

I came to conclusion that in case of mining data from web, Xpath proved to be the best & most efficient.

In case of updates, we don’t need anything, but only the content holder Xpath tree structure of the content & we can get the content in single shot.Regular expression & other ways were very inefficient & time consuming.

Thanks to Farhan for sharing his valuable expertise with us on Fahd Murtaza’s Blog.

Sothink DHTML Menu 8

– Easy Builder to Create JavaScript Cross Browser Menus!

Sothink DHTML Menu is a comprehensive navigation solution for web site. It creates drop-down menu easily and behaves friendly to search engine. Includes user-friendly interface, keyboard navigation, fresh templates, lots of effects and optimal publishing. Tree-like menu can be switched to drop-down menu. Copy and paste menu items in different menu files. Supports Windows Vista. Free add-ins for Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Expression Web and GoLive.

Version 8.2 supports Keyboard Navigation function, which enables user to control the menu by using the keyboard; adds advanced function to both Menu Item Setting and Separator Setting.

Fahd Murtaza’s Database driven Dynamic DHTML Menu with Sothink DHTML Menu Builder

If you are an ASP developer, you might find ASP based, database driven Dynamic categories oriented DHTML menu done by me a great thing for you! You can view planet source code submission for the same Dynamic DHTML drop down/flyout menu from the Access File using ASP to generate the Javascript here at this link!

/*
mysql> select CONCAT(“a”,”B”);
+—————–+
| CONCAT(“a”,”B”) |
+—————–+
| aB |
+—————–+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

*/
select CONCAT(“a”,”B”);

You can use this concat in any kind of SQL command! All depends upon your creativity. For example I had a country names database with a column for flag icons which I thoughtI would insert later on. It was empty for long time and only countries names were in it. So I got the country flag icons from a friend. Just put them in a folder and used concat for concatenating (joining) the names of the country names with a ‘.gif’ to generate the flag icons’ names! Used them in the update query and it worked. Saved me hours of data entry!

Migrate Microsoft SQL Server Transact-SQL to Oracle PL/SQL

SwisSQL – SQL Server to Oracle Migration Tool helps you migrate MS SQL Server Transact-SQL Procedures, Functions and Triggers to Oracle PL/SQL language. When enterprises migrate from MS SQL Server to Oracle, application migration is one of the tedious tasks and there are no good tools which can ease the process of migrating MS SQL Server Stored Procedures to Oracle PL/SQL. Using SwisSQL – SQL Server to Oracle Migration Tool and through AdventNet’s superior support, enterprises can realize significant time and cost savings during the migration and testing process.

For more information on this tool, go to this page. 

Introduction

hyperGIS enables you to publish geographic information to Flash enabled browsers and devices. Data layers created in hyperGIS can be edited directly in a web browser for on-line geocoding applications.

The system is vector based, utilising the most ubiquitous vector technology on the internet and mobile devices, Adobe Flash. This gives hyperGIS many of the advantages of vector based GIS (small file sizes, attributes on map objects, high quality printing), without the need for a dedicated plug-in. Flash is pre-installed on over 98% of web browsers and a growing number of PDA’s and mobile phones*.

hyperGIS is suitable for wide deployment applications such as Location Based Services, information portals, real estate, government agency internet and intranet presentations, basically anywhere where geographic information needs to be available fast and dynamic over a network.

Any GIS format can be converted to a hyperGIS database. When you publish your GIS files in hyperGIS you can preserve an objects attributes for use in all manner of client side calculations and visualisations.

hyperGIS editors are typically 100% web based for remote creation and maintenance of content. They can be integrated with CMS (Content Management System) for seamless site management set-ups.

hyperGIS™ KeyFeatures

• Publish any GIS file format or database to Flash enabled devices
• Publish vector and raster formats
• Create advanced navigation and interactivity
• Display data via XML feeds
• Display WMS data layers
• Query SQL spatial and non-spatial databases and display results instantly.
• Automate data publishing and distribution.
• Add your own icons and polygons together with links, directly in any web browser
• Platform independent client (requires Flash 6 or higher)
• Web client less than 15Kb
• Highspeed data transfer, even over small bandwidths.
• Infinite fluid zoom and pan

The category has been moved here!