Scraping In The Name Of!

In this article, we will once again be using the magic of software to enhance our lives. We will be using a technique known as web scraping to gather weather information to prepare for whatever mother nature throws at us. This could be useful if you live in a suburb and must commute some distance to work in the city. It will be beneficial to know the current weather conditions (as well as the day's forecast) in both locations without having to visit multiple web pages to do so.

The goal of this article is to explain how to use web scraping techniques to gather data from the web to display some meaningful information. Our project will scrape weather.com for current conditions and the day's forecast in two locations and display them in a single interface, eliminating the need to navigate multiple pages to acquire all the desired information. We will be writing our application in PHP and following a step-by-step process that includes devising a plan and developing the software to accomplish our goal.

This tutorial is not meant to teach you PHP or programming paradigms, but rather demonstrate how learning to write software can enhance your life by giving you the ability to extract information from multiple sources and combine it in a way that is meaningful to you.