On the Developer Tutorials blog today Akash Mehta looks at screen scraping using a simple DOM library to help make it easy.

In PHP, regular expressions tend to get rather messy, DOM calls can be confusing and verbose, and often the string functions just aren't enough. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use the middle ground - the open source PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser library, which provides jQuery-grade awesomeness for easy screen scraping without messy regular expressions.

In his examples he shows how to grab the contents of a page (google.com), find and replace information in the HTML and perform a query on the data (like finding each of the news stories out of the front page of slashdot.org).