Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, 2nd Edition

Standard Parse Routines

Parsing is largely a matter of manipulating strings. Since there are so many string manipulation methods in PHP, it can be daunting for the beginner to decide which approach to take when developing a parsing strategy for a specific web page. I will show you how nearly any web page can be parsed with amazingly few methods—and by limiting yourself to a handful of methods, the entire parsing-development process goes more smoothly. For this reason, I simplified parsing by identifying a few useful functions and placing them into a library called LIB_parse. Primarily, LIB_parse contains wrapper functions that provide simple interfaces to otherwise complicated routines. These functions (or a combination of them) provide everything ...