I published "Facebook Remote Status Update with PHP/cURL Bot" in Feb 4 2014. The script was working well until early this year. I received comments and emails that script no longer working and requested an update. So here I try to find out any changes to Facebook login form and status update.

In summary, the login portion still working fine. However, Facebook has converted status update form into unicode format as well as one of the key value in the status update form. In fact, just need to change one line of my old script to continue our facebook autologin and status update.

** The script in this post no longer working properly. I have updated the script and posted at New and Updated! Facebook Remote Status Update with PHP/cURL Bot  **

In previous posts, the discussion is mainly focus on getting web page source file and perform scraping to the text file. In this post, I will show you how I use PHP/cURL to login into Facebook account and post status update at Facebook wall. Once we know how to remote posting using PHP/cURL, we can do many things such as auto posting comment into forum or blog, fill up contact form and send email to our target, login to website and pull out information we need.

For this test case, I am using XAMPP in the PC and login to Facebook mobile interface which is much simpler than its desktop version. You can try to compare Facebook login source file for both desktop and mobile version.

From the browser, go to http://m.facebook.com and there is only one login form.

In this post, I will show you how to further modify our email extractor script to inject crawling capability and collect as many targeted email list as possible.

The trick is quite simple - we are not crawling entire website and check each and every web page for email addresses. Doing this will consume a lot of bandwidth and our time. We just need to crawl web pages with targeted email listing: so as long as we know total pages to crawl, then looping from first page to last page and job is done!

First, inspect the pagination of our targeted website. In the example we use, it has page 1, 2, 3,... and "Last" page button. Pressing this button will take us to the last page, which is page 169. Each page has 10 email addresses, so we can get almost 1690 emails from this website. The total number of pages (169 at present) can be changed in future. If we want to reuse our email extractor script with minimum manual editing, it needs to be able to auto detect total pages.

In this post, we need to make a small modification to previous PHP script for targeted email extraction.

First, we need to revisit the source file of the targeted web page, we can see that there are repeated blocks of agent contacts, with name, email and phone number. Total of 10 blocks per page. 

The plan is to use the script to "cut out" each block and stores into array, then extract name, email and phone number from each block.

As you can see, each block starts with <div class="negotiators-wrapper"> tag and ends with </div></div>. Note that both </div> tags are separated by carriage return and new line feed in this example. 

In this post, I will explain how to use PHP/cURL to extract / harvest email addresses from websites. The script will involve regular expression to match HTML tag for extraction.

If we send out email and address the person as "Dear Sir" or "Dear Madam", most likely the email will end up as spam. We do not want to just extract email addresses only, but also other information related to the email addresses, such as name, telephone, company, job position etc. When we send out email from the list collected, we want to be able to address the contact person as detail as possible, such as with his/her name, job position in the company, contact number etc.

Of course, please do not abuse the ability of email extraction and send out unwanted spam mails, products/services advertising, violate copyright law or disturbing network bandwidth etc. If you get into trouble, talk to your lawyer please.