Former Perl users ? : Spidering/Scraping in PHP

[George Orwell]

Would I be missing much if I stopped trying to learn Perl well enough to use for
spidering, screen scraping etc. and converted over to PHP ? I am looking to do
all, or at least most of the hacks decribed in the books "Spidering Hacks" and
"Perl & LWP". I am familiar with the book "Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A
Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL" Would anyone know of any other
sources of info related to this kind of thing ?

TIA
Roger H.

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[Erwin Moller]

George Orwell schreef:

Would I be missing much if I stopped trying to learn Perl well enough to use for
spidering, screen scraping etc. and converted over to PHP ? I am looking to do
all, or at least most of the hacks decribed in the books "Spidering Hacks" and
"Perl & LWP". I am familiar with the book "Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A
Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL" Would anyone know of any other
sources of info related to this kind of thing ?

TIA
Roger H.

Hi Roger,

I am quite sure you can do whatever you want to do using PHP when it
comes to spidering/agents.

If you are familiar with Curl, you are on the right track.
I expect you can translate any Perl code to PHP if you understand both
languages.

I do not know of any dedictaed sources on the subject, but googling
around will surely give some relevant hits.

Some pointers (maybe you know this already)
REGEX:
If you need regular expressions, and I expect you will be using them, be
sure to use the PCRE flavor in PHP. (Perl Compaticle Regex)
The functionnames all start with preg_

The functions can be found here:
http://nl3.php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php

Using preg will safe you a headache when using Perl style regex.

Database:
If you use a database to store the information, I think your best bet is
using PDO to interface with the database of your choice, be it MySQL or
Postgresql, etc. (I am a fan of Postgresql)

A lot of info can be found here:
http://nl3.php.net/manual/en/book.pdo.php

Hope this helps a little.
Good luck.

Regards,
Erwin Moller