Hello PHP freaks, I have come for some non-coding PHP advise/help. I have never used PHP myself and know very little about the language. I am trying to figure out if I can use PHP for a project I am currently involved in and need a few very specific pieces of informational for a very specific running environment. The general situation is that I am stuck using GoDaddy shared linux hosting. Before I had access to the account to test in the environment it was to be used in, I already wrote a program in Perl. GoDaddy "supports" Perl, but only an old version and it does not support installing Perl CPAN modules. If you do not know much about Perl, from my understanding this basically means you cannot do much with it as the core Perl is just very basic and designed to be used alongside modules. Specifically, you do not have access to Make or a C compiler on these GoDaddy accounts. I am here to ask if you could give me enough knowledge about PHP to tell if GoDaddy supports PHP well enough to actually do something with it. I am not asking for GoDaddy specific information, though that would be great. What version of PHP is really a necessity? GoDaddy has PHP 5.3 installed, but you can downgrade to 5.2.
Note (not sure what this means, or if it matters. I know they disabled Sockets in Perl): GoDaddy states: The PHP 5 function register_globals is turned off by default. To change the status of a function, you can use custom initialization (php5.ini) files. Does PHP have a module/custom class/library system that requires any sort of install at all or access to system folders?
Will lack of make and/or a C compiler possibly be a problem? My project requires a powerful and robust web scrapper, something that uses CSS Selectors if at all possible (but at least something as robust). And really needs some sort of Try/Catch style error handling, or whatever equivalent PHP has. (For perl you need a custom module for this) And finally I will need the ability to access MySQL Databases. (I am sure GoDaddy comes with whatever is needed for this) so what do you think? Thanks in advance for any help, jonathon