Automating Data Extraction

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oscardog
Forum Contributor
Posts: 245
Joined: Thu Oct 23, 2008 4:43 pm

Automating Data Extraction

Post by oscardog »

Hello,

I am currently in the process of gathering all the information from http://www.findamachine.com/directory/J ... _Engineers. It's pretty long and tedious.

Is there a way to extra the data from this page http://www.findamachine.com/directory/J ... of_America (If you click on the company name you get information, have to be signed in though to see some of it).

Anyway is there a way, with PHP or other, to extract the data? I need company name, email, phone and contact name.

Regards,

Ashley
jraede
Forum Contributor
Posts: 254
Joined: Tue Feb 16, 2010 5:39 pm

Re: Automating Data Extraction

Post by jraede »

It's called scraping. You'd have to either use curl or file_get_contents to get the html output from that page, and then parse it using regular expressions to find the data you're looking for. But I think the legality of that is pretty iffy.
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