NYCPHP Meetup

[Brian Dailey]

Chris,

I just recently was faced with a similar problem, but I'm not sure if my 
solution is 100% helpful or not. I ended up using grep to find what I 
was looking for, and then indicating the column position (which was 
pretty reliable) to further narrow down any false positives. It's sort 
of difficult to give a lot of help since we can't see the files 
themselves. I know for the project I worked on there was a lot of 
tweaking involved to make it 100% accurate.

Would it be easier to obtain the results in another fashion? If you ran 
some sort of 'df -h' on a Linux file system you could get the disk space 
from that. Are the emailed reports are your only option?

- Brian D.

csnyder wrote:
> I've had this idea in the back of my head to do a project that
> systematically tracks values embedded in web or email reports. For
> instance, I get logwatch emails from the servers I admin, and each
> time one of those comes in I'd like to extract the disk free space and
> put it into a round-robin database. Or I want to track the rendering
> time for various key pages in a CMS.
> 
> The problem is that the value isn't always in the same place. It might
> be a few lines down because of alerts or content that precede it. Or
> it might look different some days (ending in GB rather than MB). It's
> possible that some combination of regex and recurrence number ( 5th
> instance of /[0-9]*(MB|BG)/ ) could work, but it seems messy.
> 
> We all probably do a little of this on an ad hoc basis, scraping
> values out of websites and whatnot. Does anyone do it a lot? What kind
> of tools do you use? Is Perl better suited to the task? Or sed+awk?
> Does anyone know of a system (preferably php) that does this in the
> general case?
> 
> TIA, y'all.
> 

-- 

Thanks!
- Brian Dailey
Software Developer
New York, NY
www.dailytechnology.net
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