PHPBuilder.com has posted a new tutorial about creating automated FTP scripts to pull down information from a remote server (using FTP streams).

In 2007 I began working on a website project for an investment company in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio USA. The purpose of this website was to automatically download financial data of traded securities from two (2) remote Web servers. [...] Both of these PHP scripts were set up on the Web server's "crontab manager" to automatically run at a set time each business day.

Code is included showing how to connect to the remote service (via curl) with a "ftp" stream-based URL as the location. Also included is an example using a fopen call to the URL and inserting the resulting data into their tracking tables. The other script pulls the data out and adds a new record to a transactions table for the current day.