DOM manipulation with PHP, the ultimate page scraper?
By Andres, January 12, 2010 no responsesThese days we hear a good deal about DOM manipulation with JavaScript but some little known technologies ( for now – they’re quickly gaining ground ) are xPath, xQuery & XSLT.
Fellow developers will know that historically we’ve had to rely on a number of regular expressions to scrape a page and while this can most often be fast, it’s sometimes horrendous to read and edit as a TINY mis-write can effectively render the Regular Expression useless. That’s not to say it’s not useful when the hierarchy is small and simple but in today’s world of web 2.0 designs they’re often not.
