pulling content from other web sites

mfalomir

is it possible to pull content from other web sites using PHP ?

Brendan_Nolan

http://php.net/fread

Shrike

Scraping is generally frowned upon btw 😉

mfalomir

hehe but its for "news publishing" purposes...is it still frowned ? 🙂

furious5

If you are pulling information for news feeds why not use XML feed?

Scraping is very frowned upon for obvious reasons.

mfalomir

I was trying to complicate my life using PHP instead of XML...

AstroTeg

Check out Curl:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.curl.php

Its a lot more complex than fread() and its possible most hosts do not have it enabled, but it can do some really slick tasks. Its able to handle cookies and server authentication so your PHP script can behave much like an actual browser.