Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers

Chapter 17. CONVERTING A WEBSITE INTO A FUNCTION

Webbots are easier to use when they're packaged as functions. These functions are simply interfaces to webbots that download and parse information and return the desired data in a predefined structure. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) provides weather forecasts on its website (http://www.noaa.gov). You could write a function to execute a webbot that downloads and parses a forecast. This interface could also return the forecast in an array, as shown in Listing 17-1.

# Get weather forecast
$forcast_array = get_noaa_forecast($zip=89109);

# Display forecast
echo $forcast_array['MONDAY']['TEMPERATURE']."<br>";
echo $forcast_array['MONDAY']['WIND_SPEED']."<br>"; echo ...