Question

I want to extract data from ehow.com regarding different topics to store in my database. Problem is there are multiple web pages I have to sift through to get the info from this website. In order to to go through the multitude of web pages and pull the data I need, would I use a scraper like SimpleHTMLDOM or would I need to use a web crawler?

Answer 1

First consider that you’re allowed to do that on eHow.com or not. I guess you couldn’t do that in the way you explained here.

Anyways, regarding your question:

Crawler moves from page to page and/or website to website, and Parser will parse the page content and will store them in a reusable way which meet your needs. In order to do that, you need both of them, or you need to provide the URLs for your Parser manually.

Update:

Useful links about Crawler:

PHP Crawler

PHPCrawl

Simple PHP crawler example