What programming language can be used to access other websites and gather information?

[drake45]

There are certain web apps that can access external websites and gather information.

One example is a serp checker:


User submits URL + Keywords to a website > The website uses this information to search google serp's and return the keywords positions > the website tells the user his rank position.


Can such actions be accomplished with Javascript/php? If not then what language can develop such web apps which allow a website to gather and return information from external websites?

 

[Diplomat]

PHP will work, Javascript not

 

[change]

php cUrl will do that

 

[neutralhatter]

PHP will work, Javascript not

This is wrong. Javascript will work fine. Many languages will, but the real question is what is the fastest way...

 

[SlimProxies]

Python, Java, PHP, Javascript, Ajax, etc can all be used.

In other words, almost every language will do, you just have to choose if you want the data received on the server or client side.
I would suggest you start with PHP, since it's pretty straightforward (google PHP curl), and the online PHP community is huge.

 

[Gophering]

Any Turing complete language will work here.

 

[sm754]

Whatever languages have good HTML parsing libraries (regex doesn't count).
C/C++, C#, Java, PHP seem to all have decent options.

 

[jazzc]

Any Turing complete language will work here.

Scraping in Postscript sounds fun

 

[Gophering]

Scraping in Postscript sounds fun

Pfff, imagine scraping in brainfuck.

 

[IceHD]

I'm using SimplePie, it's PHP library that read xml feeds and uses cache/mysql to show the data. I also have a Pyton script that work greate, but I don't have the skills to enhace it.
I suggest using Python or C#, because of the seed.

 

[apoorv]

Pfff, imagine scraping in brainfuck.

Haha!

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To the OP, for that specific example, pretty much anything would work: Ruby or Python using Mechanize, PHP using cURL, or CasperJS if you are going to use JS (though the speeds are slow).