PHP and jQuery progress bar while parsing

PHP and jQuery progress bar while parsing

I was wondering how I could go about making a progress bar for parsing
HTML data. Essentially the user searches something and I parse another
website. I tried doing it with getting the amount of objects found in an
array then dividing 100 by it, and getting the current one in a for loop
and multiplying it by 100/total. Then I would update a text file with the
value. Then update the progress bar with that value. However, I want a
more efficient way to do it. Also it has to be unique to each user.
Thanks.