Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers

Initialization and Downloading the Target

The example script initializes by including the LIB_http and LIB_parse libraries you read about earlier. It also creates an array where the parsed data is stored, and it sets the product counter to zero, as shown in Listing 7-1.

# Initialization
include("LIB_http.php");
include("LIB_parse.php");
$product_array=array();
$product_count=0;

# Download the target (practice store) web page
$target = "http://www.schrenk.com/webbots/example_store";
$web_page = http_get($target, "");

Listing 7-1: Initializing the price-monitoring webbot

After initialization, the script proceeds to download the target web page with the get_http() function described in Chapter 3.

After downloading the web page, the script parses all ...