Despite all the advancements in web APIs and interoperability, it's inevitable that, at some point in your career, you will have to "scrape" content from a website that was not built with web services in mind. And, despite its sometimes less-than-stellar reputation, web scraping is usually an entire legitimate activity-for example, to capture data from an old version of a website for insertion into a modern CMS. This book, written by scraping expert Matthew Turland, covers web scraping techniques and topics that range from the simple to exotic using a variety of technologies and frameworks: · Understanding HTTP requests · The PHP HTTP streams wrapper · cURL · pecl_http · PEAR:HTTP · Zend_Http_Client · Building your own scraping library · Using Tidy · Analyzing code with the DOM, SimpleXML and XMLReader extensions · CSS selector libraries · PCRE pattern matching · Tips and Tricks · Multiprocessing / parallel processing