obtaining info from another website?

[Chucklez]

I have only been doing PHP coding for a month or 2 now, and what little I know is self taught, so please bear with me.

A little Background:
I play an online game, and I run a personal site that keeps track of player rankings. Now individual rankings fluctuate from 1 minute to the next, and I want to provide my users up to the minute information. This current information is displayed next to information obtained from the last update. This way you can see if your game ranking has increased, decreased or stayed the same.

Currently, if a user wants to view an updated listing, he needs to go to the site, copy and paste the information into the form i designed, and click the submit button. I have php code that parses the information, checks it against the previous updated listing stored in an SQL DB, and displays it properly formated.

What I would like to do is skip the copy and paste portion of this. Is it possible to use the cookie information to send a request, obtain this info, and process it the way I described above? If so, how? Im not asking someone to code it for me, just point me in the right direction. I have a programming background already, so I can figure out the logic, I just need pointed in the right direction.

I know it seems a silly thing to do, but it keeps me busy.

Any questions I can answer to help you give me an answer I will give. Thanks in advance.

 

[jpadie]

in principal you can retrieve information from a cookie, yes.

but how does the information get into the cookie. it sounds as though it is client side? in this case you could design some javascript to retrieve the information and either put it into a cookie or a form. but browsers tend not to let this happen without user confirmation due to security concerns!

alternatively you could write a wee VB or C program etc and have your users download that. it could then pump your servers with data on a regular basis.

however- most game servers keep statistics on their users and can be queried externally. which might save you the trouble of a client-side update.

 

[Chucklez]

well, What I meant by cookie, Is the cookie contains the users "key" to allow them to connect to the server. Does that make sense?

They have to be logged into the gaming site, in order to view any information. So what I meant by cookie is, it will use the cookie information for authorization to query the DB.

I have thought of creating a program that will routinely execute and download the required info, but the developers of the game will not allow that. Basically, its a bandwidth issue. That is how I came up with the concept of cutting and pasting. It is not automated, and is completely manual. therefore it is completely within the rules. Now, by MANUALLY submitting a request to the DB (as I described earlier), technically it is still within the guidelines established by the developers.

I know what information to pass in the url to create a page with the info I want. What I dont know is how to automatically capture that info before the page is rendered (or after, it dosent matter), and use it for my purposes.

I hope I am being clear, but probably not.

Maybee this will help.
In IE, you have the option of exporting a page to excel. Once you have selected the table you wish to export, you are also given an option of when to refresh it. Now, in excel, that information is displayed on the spreadsheet all nice and neat. I think that is what I am attempting to do. I want that info from the server, without having to sort thru the html code to get it. That make sense?