Simple PHP Scraping with jQuery Like Selectors using Simple HTML Dom

If you need to do some HTML parsing, scraping etc then you generally have the choice of using the DOM approach to parse the HTML or using regex to pull bits out. I quite like both approaches, there are pros and cons to both so having both options available is the best to ensure you use the right tool for the job on a case by case basis.

Recently though I discovered Simple HTML Dom. This makes the DOM based approach almost ridiculously easy, especially if you are comfortable with jQuery like selectors for pulling out specific DOM nodes.

You can read all about it here: http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/manual.htm

First impressions are really good, its very easy and the lead in time from installation to using is really fast. I like that, never been much of a fan of having to RTFM for everything!