Pirate Bay name and magnet mailer So, first time I try PHP. Thought I'd set a goal for myself, divide it up in smaller problems and start googling. So yes I got it to work, very happy.

But, it is rather crude and ugly. So now I would like to know how it should look.
Proper regex, proper formatting in the array, keeping the links as links and any other tips.

Just to be clear, what it does: You place this on a server you have, browse to the url where the file is, it scrapes Pirate Bay, and emails you the names and magnets. It could be used by one person on his web domain as private 'proxy'. No one else can see or use it and it is all in one simple file.

I miss-posted earlier but they did say using cache would be smart.

$data = file_get_contents('http://thepiratebay.se/top/201');
$selected = '/Details.for.(.+?)"|magnet:.+?"/';
preg_match_all($selected,$data,$matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);

$to = "me@domain.com";
$subject = "Pirate Mail";

if (mail($to, $subject, print_r($matches, 1), 'From: BlackBeard@piratemail.com')) {
   echo("&lt;p&gt;Message successfully sent!&lt;/p&gt;");
  } else {
   echo("&lt;p&gt;Message delivery failed...&lt;/p&gt;");
  }
Generally, RegExps are a bad choice to deal with HTML code. You're better of with DOM parser: parse the tree and then use XPath to find desired elements, i.e. the ones containing the torrent name and the magnet link. I'm not posting any code because I've never done it in PHP though, but as a pointer...

Anyway, if you just wanted a simple script that just works, you're good, and if you wanted to do some self-education, you can try parsing the DOM.

The first search result from Google gives me this: http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/

And some points on the code style:

You have some weird (IMO) indentation in the if statement. Usually the closing bracket is on the same level as if is, i.e.:

if (mail($to, $subject, print_r($matches, 1), 'From: BlackBeard@piratemail.com')) {
    echo("&lt;p&gt;Message successfully sent!&lt;/p&gt;");
} else {
    echo("&lt;p&gt;Message delivery failed...&lt;/p&gt;");
}


And you have inconsistent spaces-after-arguments:

preg_match_all($selected,$data,$matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
....
mail($to, $subject, print_r($matches, 1), 'From: BlackBeard@piratemail.com')


Second one (with spaces after commas) is usually a preferred one.