Does Bluehost support curl for screen scraping URLs?

[terrybleizeffer]

(Whenever I search the forum, it gives me a "Forbidden - You don't have permission to access /search.php on this server" so I apologize for asking a question that's probably been answered before)

The program I'm writing uses curl to screen scrape basketball stats from a series of URLs - I'm in a college basketball roto/fantasy league and I'm trying to automate our scoring system. I know some servers frown on screen scraping and disallow it, so before I sign up for bluehost I want to make sure that this is supported.

If there's another way besides curl to get these numbers, I'd also be interested in that. To be specific, I'm going to a page like this...

http://kenpom.com/team.php?team=Indiana

... and getting the latest conference record, plus the adjusted efficiency for offense and defense. Screen scraping is the only way I know how to do something like that.

[Basil]

You apparently can't put "curl" in the url on the forum without it throwing a 403 error.

To answer your question, if bluehost didn't want people using curl they'd disable it. As long as you aren't using it to make a public proxy you should be fine.

I recommend caching the results though, there's no reason for it to query the external page if the data hasn't changed. For example have a cron job update the few values you want once a day or however often it might change.