Despite all the advancements in web APIs and interoperability, it’s inevitable that, at some point in your career, you will have to “scrape” content from a website that was not built with web services in mind. And, despite its sometimes less-than-stellar reputation, web scraping is usually an entire legitimate activity—for example, to capture data from an old version of a website for insertion into a modern CMS.

This book, written by scraping expert Matthew Turland, covers web scraping techniques and topics that range from the simple to exotic using a variety of technologies and frameworks:

To use it, download a playlist from Playlist.com.
You do this by clicking the “Export Playlist To Windows Media Player” link on the right side of the site. If it doesn’t prompt you to download a file, right click the link and select Save As.

Then upload the asx.wvx file here: samutz.com/playlist
The script will generate links from the playlist. You can then download them individually or use something like DownThemAll to get them all at once.

Source and more technical info after the jump.

Asx.wvx is basically just an xml file that Windows Media Player can read to play the songs in the playlist.

You can load it in to PHP with SimpleXML.

Here’s the source code for the page I made at samutz.com/playlist

<form action="index.php" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
<input type="hidden" name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="1048576" />
<input type="file" name="file" />
<input type="submit" value="Upload" />
</form>

<?php
if (isset($_FILES['file']) && $_FILES['file']['error']==0) {
	$xml = simplexml_load_file($_FILES['file']['tmp_name']);
	foreach ($xml->entry as $entry) {
		$attr = $entry->ref->attributes();
		echo '<a href="'.$attr['href'].'">'.$entry->title.' by '.$entry->author.'</a><br/>';
	}
} else {
	echo 'Upload asx.wvx above.';
}
?>