Turland M. PHP|architect's Guide to Web Scraping with PHP

Marco Tabini & Associates, Inc., 2010. — 192 p. ISBN: 0981034519.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