<Web scraping with PHP and XPath ⁄ >

When I was writing about how I use web scraping, I was still hadn't tried using Xpath (shame on me). sssscripting blog responded to my article with very good and rich post about all sorts of different techniques for scraping (with Ruby examples) and after reading this post in Kore Nordmann blog I finally decided to try making something with Xpath.

It turned out, that using Xpath is extremely easy, really. When you master it, you can do everything in seconds. Yes, you need to know how XML works and how to write correct Xpath queries (brief explanation of Xpath syntax is available at W3Schools), but hey - these topics are in 1st year of university.

Also, there are good tools like XPath checker for Firefox which allows you to debug and test your queries without writing any code. Stupid to say, but XPath queries looks a lot like CSS selectors, but with much more power and flexibility. Without further talking, lets look at example (idea from Kore's article):



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