I'm learning php and website development in general. Currently I'm trying to write a script in php that would access a website as Internet Explorer (important) and look for a specified word/pattern everywhere possible. Simply parsing doesn't do the job.
The thing is, I can do that manually - I open website X and press F12 in Internet Explorer->debugging section and I search there. However I have no idea how to implement such a thing in php or any other language.
TL:DR Need to extract data from a webpage the same way I do it manually (explained in paragraph above). However, simply parsing doesn't do the job. I need to achieve that in php or some other server side language.
In addition to limited approaches such as file_get_contents followed by a string search (or XML parser), you can look into more feature rich libraries such as the SimpleTest Scriptable Web Browser.
You'll want to modify the user agent string in order to simulate a request from Internet Explorer.