What i want to do is create a database of lyrics for songs however i dont want to sit there and go and copy and paste for hours from another website and i know in php you can "crawl" a website and store it and i was wondering on how you do it??
Using only php you'd want to look into ob_fetch();
There's a lot of ways to go about copying a database that doesn't belong to you. You could "scrape" the data from their webserver as a last resort. There are other ways to get more direct results from their dbms depending on how they put their application together.
I haven't done it in a while, but urllib and urllib2 work for python. People also seem to like "beautiful soup" (a scraping API) for python.
A few tips:
Check for robots.txt
Try asking first, it's too easy to not try.
Don't be surprised if you get blocked from their webserver for "abuse".
You need previous experience with html or you'll be lost when it comes time to parse the data.
Retriving information from another website
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