Looking for guidance on text-parsing project

[burningdowntrees]

Hi,

I'm interested in creating a program that essentially text parses format-consistent forms. I want the program to be able to pull data from these forms and database it.

I plan on hiring a programmer but because of my limited knowledge on this topic I dont really know where to look.

So my questions are:

1. How feasible is such a program?

2. Whats the best language to use for this particular project?

I created a posting in the classifieds section regarding this job, so if anyone is interested please reference that posting.

Thanks in advance!

[John]

Actually, for the past several months I've been working on a program for a game I play. Essentially all statistics for a player are stored on a remote site in which I don't have access to their database directly. So I had to create, what I like to call an "engine," to connect to the site, parse the statistics, and store those stats in a local database. That way I can perform manipulations on them as I wished.

I've searched and looked into other languages, but PHP works just as well as any other language.

With that said, a few notes I've found that may help you are:

1) Parsing a remote site depends on the sites content. If the remote site updates their content, changes some text, rearranges their site, you have to make changes to your parsing engine.

2) Since you are connecting to a remote site, potentially many times in a short time period, you want to make sure your server doesn't get banned from their server. As they may mistake several connections for a ddos attack. Therefor, it might be a good idea to use multiple proxy's that can use to connect to the site.

3) Depending on how much content you need to parse, the load itself can use many of your server's resources. My script originally ran every twenty-four hours, and parsed up to one hundred pages. This caused a significant load on the server, so with some minor tweaks, making the script run every hour and parse four pages improved the engine's performance.