Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers

Appendix A. PHP/CURL REFERENCE

This appendix highlights the options and features of PHP/CURL that will be of greatest interest to webbot developers. In addition to the features described here, you should know that PHP/CURL is an extremely powerful interface with a dizzying array of options. A full specification of PHP/CURL is available at the PHP website.^[93]

Creating a Minimal PHP/CURL Session

In some regards, a PHP/CURL session is similar to a PHP file I/O session. Both create a session (or file handle) to reference an external file. And in both cases, when the file transfer is complete, the session is closed. However, PHP/CURL differs from standard file I/O because it requires a series of options that define the nature of the file transfer ...