This isn't a difficult task in PHP. For ideas and how to start, I'd
recommend Michael Schrenk's "Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A
Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL". It's not very
deep or technical, but if you pick apart the libraries he provides (be
aware of his licensing) you'll get a good grasp on how to build your
own simple scrapers and parsers for exactly that task.
- Dane Harmon
On Apr 15, 2008, at 5:22 PM, Mark Wheeler wrote:
Hi,
I've come across a chore that I'm not sure how to work out. Our
business uses a third party company to get prices for our site.
These prices can change frequently. But, our partner site has to
contact yet ANOTHER site to update it's pricing database so it will
feed us our prices. Yeah, I know - it's crazy, but that's the way it
is, so we deal with it. Bottom line is, I need to go and "check" the
prices of many products on our parter site so I can get the "real"
current price. That takes a lot of time. So here's what I thought to
do, if possible. Can a PHP script, when given the correct "starting"
page, automatically click through the 2 pages - parse the page
somehow - necessary to update the prices? It's just as if I were
doing it, but the script is the "browser" instead of me. I'm
thinking this can be called by a cron job. Again, I'm aware that
this is an odd question and circumstance and I 'm not sure I'm
explaining myself clearly. But if possible, this would be a REAL
time saver. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Mark
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