php|architect’s Guide to Web Scraping with PHP

Despite all the advancements in web APIs and interoperability, it’s inevitable that, at some point in your career, you will have to “scrape” content from a website that was not built with web services in mind. And, despite its sometimes less-than-stellar reputation, web scraping is usually an entire legitimate activity—for example, to capture data from an old version of a website for insertion into a modern CMS.

This book, written by scraping expert Matthew Turland, covers web scraping techniques and topics that range from the simple to exotic using a variety of technologies and frameworks:

• Understanding HTTP requests
• The PHP HTTP streams wrapper
• cURL
• pecl_http
• PEAR:HTTP
• Zend_Http_Client
• Building your own scraping library
• Using Tidy
• Analyzing code with the DOM, SimpleXML and XMLReader extensions
• CSS selector libraries
• PCRE pattern matching
• Tips and Tricks
• Multiprocessing / parallel processing