The htmlSQL project is a PHP class that will allow developers to access HTML tags and attributes using SQL like syntax. It looks like the project has actually been around for a few years, however I just heard about it. I have worked on several personal data scraping projects that use HTML as the source. My normal route is to just use regular expressions to get the data I need and then dump it into a local database. htmlSQL could really speed up the time it takes to select the right data and I see big potential for those types of projects.

I haven’t got to play with htmlSQL yet, but I do plan on writing a tutorial using it soon. If you are interested in htmlSQL you can check out the htmlSQL Live Example or the htmlSQL site.

It’s been difficult to find the time to write tutorials lately. I finally decided to sit down and write one today. A wrote a tutorial on Simple XML to XHTML Transformation using XSLT. It should be pretty simple for beginners to follow.