Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, 2nd Edition

Introducing PHP/CURL

While PHP is capable when it comes to simple file downloads, most real-life applications require additional functionality to handle advanced issues such as form submission, authentication, redirection, and so on. These functions are difficult to facilitate with PHP’s built-in functions alone. Forunately, every PHP install should include a library called PHP/CURL, which automatically takes care of these advanced topics. Most of this book’s examples exploit the benefit of PHP/CURL’s ability to download files.

The open source cURL project is the product of Swedish developer Daniel Stenberg and a team of developers. The cURL library is available for use with nearly any computer language you can think of. When cURL is used with ...