Bob Showalter wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I have a PHP vs. Perl question for a hobby project of mine. Which > > would be the better language to use if I wanted to go out to a > > particular web page and parse the table that's there? How about if > > each row in the HTML table contains a link to another Web page which > > has information I want to grab? (BTW, the page I'm thinking of is the > > Catalog of Extrasolar Planets by Jean Schneider, at > > http://www.obspm.fr/encycl/catalog.html.) > > > > FYI, I've never done any Web programming. > > AFAIK, PHP is a server-side language. What you're describing is a client > application. I don't think you can write general-purpose client applications > using PHP (PHP guys correct me if I'm wrong!). I'm sure PHP can do HTTP > client stuff, but I think you still need to be operating in the server > environment. > > Perl has the LWP family of modules for doing HTTP client applications, as > well as various HTML and XML parsing modules that can be used for what > you're describing.
PHP does describe itself as a genral-purpose language. We know, though, that Perl has LWP::UserAgent, which sound pretty well-suited for scott's task. He would probably have to ask on a PHP list to really get a wide range of eedback on client modules available for PHP My guess is that there is sometime similar, and the decision would come down to a matter of taste. Joseph -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
