This whole thing of extracting data from a HTML source is about populating a web-shop. My plan was to harvest as much data as needed and do some 'magick' with it and then use Rpc-XML to update the Magento Database. Guess none of the websites will be friendly in allowing me access to their source, mainly because they do not own their data, they license a web-shop and the data is being provided by another party.

is this theft ? - don't answer

not every html-source has the same underlying database and some web-sites do provide additional, meaningfull data, that the 'big-player' does not have. So yes, I will make different scrapers for each and every web-site, and even for different product types.

The whole process will roughly be something like the following:

1. Enter a product ID
2. get html and save a coache
3. proces data on disk and create source.xml
4. do something meaningful with the sources
5. ask user for confirmation or missing information where needed
6. do something meaningful with the sources and save productinfo.xml


7. take the product.xml and turn it into a magento.xml with XSLT
8. feed the magento database

I did a nice job with dirty programming, but the moment I encountered the cp1252 rubbish in my (suposedly) iso-8859-1 I gave up and wanted to start from scratch again, using proper XML modules, no longer relying on XML::Simple, discoverd XSLT that would help me out with processing the different sources and translating them from one (general) data-model to the magento model