PHP : Screen/Web Scraping Question

[jstlouis]

Hi All,

 

I'm still a newbie to PHP and I'm having some difficulties trying to figure out how (or if) what I'm trying to do, can actually be done.

 

I've been trying to Screen/Web Scrape some websites (even google.com homepage), but NOT all the page appears.  It seems that only the HTML portions of the page get returned, but none of the Javascript (if used) returns/gets displayed.  The rest of the information (look and feel) is not included.

 

I guess essentially what I'm trying to do is take a "Snapshot" and display it as a thumbnail on my page.  I would like to be able to this for a few different sites.

 

Is what I'm trying to do even possible?  If so, would the PHP CURL library be the right tool for the job?

 

I'm testing on a variety of sites, but once I figure out what I'm doing (or if it can even be done, for that matter), I will be using it on my JSP sites (one that uses JSF and the other uses Struts and both use Javascript).

 

 

Any assistance would be very much appreciated...

 

 

Thanks in advance.

[shlumph]

I've used cURL to scrape page data. The website may have security on it, and block your IP, if it see's that you're hitting it like a mofo, though.