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