It’s occurred to me how these very easy techniques seem inaccessible to many people, so I thought I’d post a few bits and bobs about some basic scraping methods.

Here’s a bit of code I wrote to use PHP’s DOMDocument class to treat a HTML page as XML and fetch, in this case, the incredibly useful current world population… fantastic!

<?php
 // where to find population data...
 $location['url']='http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html';
 $location['id']='worldnumber';

 // initialise a new document and prepare the data
 $d=new DOMDocument();
 $file = file_get_contents($location['url']);

 // get and print current world population
 $d->loadHTML($file);
 $e=$d->getElementById($location['id']);
 print $e->nodeValue;
?>

Sample output: 6,738,610,278