There are various ways to scrape information from other websites, including JSON and RSS. However, it's also possible to build a scraper using PHP.

With regular expressions you can extract portions of content such as images, text and metadata.

Why would you do this? In one example, I build a WordPress site that automatically generate new posts every day by crawling the content of my Facebook page. You should be able to the same on Joomla, Drupal or any other CMS you use.

In this post, I'll share with you the code to extract images from a URL by using the file_get_contents() and preg_match_all() functions.