What are some best practices for handling website scraping and data extraction in PHP to avoid potential legal or ethical concerns?

When scraping websites and extracting data in PHP, it is important to respect the website's terms of service and to avoid overloading their servers with too many requests. To avoid potential legal or ethical concerns, it is best to check the website's robots.txt file for any scraping restrictions, use a reasonable rate of requests, and only extract data that is publicly available. 

// Check robots.txt file for scraping restrictions
$robotsTxt = file_get_contents('https://www.example.com/robots.txt');
if(strpos($robotsTxt, 'User-agent: *') !== false){
    // Implement scraping logic here
} else {
    die('Scraping not allowed as per robots.txt file');
}

Keywords

web scraping data extraction PHP legal concerns ethical concerns

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