It’s the screen scrapers!

When it comes to screen scraping, it looks like the way to go is with PHP5. The main basis for this conclusion is largely in part because of the simple HTML-to-XML conversion abilities that PHP5 provides us.

Now here is the cool part. You can take PHP5 and follow the instructions described here to create a dynamic screen scraping masterpiece. The finished tool will allow you to scrape from the content sources you specify while retaining the person on your site the entire time.

Here is an example of a screen-scraping meta search engine written in PHP5. It uses new PHP5 features like easy HTML-to-XML conversion and Xpath. The array declared on top of the “performSearch” function is crucial to how the search will be applied: it contains the title of the search engine to be screenscraped; its URL, with placeholder [keyword]; and the Xpath intended to grab the first relevant link.