Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, 2nd Edition

Final Thoughts

Some of these functions use an additional input parameter, $data_array, when form data is passed from the webbot to the webserver. These functions are listed below:

• http_get_form()

• http_get_form_withheader()

• http_post_form()

• http_post_form_withheader()

If you don’t understand what all these functions do now, don’t worry. Their use will become familiar to you as you go through the examples that appear later in this book. Now might be a good time to thumb through Appendix A, which details the features of PHP/CURL that webbot developers are most apt to need.