PHP or Javascript?

[cmbeke]

I'll looking to make a something that will take a webpage and find links in it and don't know what to use, so I thought I'd ask here. Is that even possible with PHP or Javascript? What do you guys recommend?

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[ohrores]

I think it would be hard with both.
Because Javascript is a client-side language and PHP a server-side language.
That means PHP runs as/on the server and Javascript on the PC of the client,
interpreted by the browser (as example Firefox).
I do not know Javascript nor PHP, so I am not sure.
I suppose a scripting language would be the best choice.

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[m0skit0]

I suppose a scripting language would be the best choice.

Perl FTW. Does wonders with file parsing. Wanna me show you how to do a web page parser?

Also a correction if you don't mind:

Because Javascript is a client-side language and PHP a server-side language.
That means PHP runs as/on the server and Javascript on the PC of the client,

Yes you're right, but you can anyway get a PHP and/or JS interpreter and run code on your own PC But as I said above, Perl also excels at this.

EDIT: Just for fun, I made it. It was a nice exercise. Probably needs a bit of polishing but it does extract the links from web pages

Code: Select all

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Online HTML Parser by m0skit0
# 12/01/2012
# Usage: script.pl <URL to parse>

use strict;
use HTML::Parser;
use LWP::UserAgent;

use constant HTTP_AGENT => "DarthPerl/3.0";
use constant HTML_LINK_TAG => "a";

# Invoked each time a starting tag is found
sub start
{
	my ($tagname, $attr) = @_;
	if ($tagname eq HTML_LINK_TAG)
	{
		print ("$attr->{href}\n");
	}
}

########
# MAIN #
########

# Create a UserAgent (HTTP client)
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
$ua->agent(HTTP_AGENT);

# Create an HTTP request
my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $ARGV[0]);

# Request the page
my $res = $ua->request($req);

# If successful
if ($res->is_success)
{
	# Create an HTML parser
	my $parser = HTML::Parser->new
	(
		api_version => 3,
		start_h => [\&start, "tagname, attr"],
	);
	
	# Parse web page
	$parser->parse($res->content);
}

# Request failed
else
{
	print "$res->status_line\n";
}

# Bye bye and have fun

[cmbeke]

thanks for the example i'll guess i'll try and learn perl then. hoping the make something to help me with my webcomic addiction (have over 100 bookmarked that I check each day )