On ProDevTips.com there's a quick new tutorial posted about using the Zend_Http component of the Zend Framework to fetch a remote page that requires cookie authentication - a "cookie jar".

As it happens I’m very satisfied with the performance of Zend Http when it comes to the fetching and cookie parts. [...] Note [in my example] the use of $client->setCookieJar();, that is all that is needed to manage the logged in state, awesome. Without it the second post to adv_stats.php would’ve failed due to unauthorized access.

This fetching method pulls in the remote file, parses out the table (as defined by a pattern match) and grabs the rows/columns using getRows and getColumns and manipulates the content inside.