Which language to use?

*** This thread is asking which Scripting language is the best to use for my particular task, described in detail below. (Just thought I'd save a lot of headache by saying so here before you read to the bottom and finally understand what I am blabbering on about.)***


I am a member of a Lithium beta forum. There are over 400,000 registered users in the database, but of course only a fraction of them (I'd estimate 5%) are "active" posters.

A few friends of mine wanted a database of users that they could sort by Rank, Registration Date, Post Count, or User ID. I'm fooling around with JavaScript, so I designed a simple script to do just that. It was given a User ID number, and a Stop number. At first, it was to begin at the User ID, load that user's profile page in a different frame, get the data of that user (using the document.getElementByTagName("span")[index].innerHTML method), and add it to a Textarea.

You JavaScripters probably already see the first problem I ran into: you cannot use JavaScript to extract information from a site unless it is run by that site. After finding a sneaky way I could make a JavaScript run on that site and changing it to load a new window instead of a frame, closing the window after it was done getting the info, and setting a timer on it so as not to flood the forums, the script actually worked.

But that is still not quite what I want to do. First of all, it is hell having to deal with FireFox opening and closing all those browser windows, thus being forced to use IE for my regular browsing (for some reason, it didn't like to work on IE for me, although it worked on a friend's IE--go fig). Secondly, I didn't really want it to have to run on my computer. Heh.

I want to run it from one of my free server accounts. I want to build a script that will allow me to load a page given a user ID, and extract the information. For this, I need to use a scripting language that has the capability to get information from other sites, create a database (a simple txt file as a database would be perfectly fine with me), and save information to it.

I know I can do this in Perl. I am only just beginning to learn PHP, but I believe it can be done in it, as well. What I want to know from you gurus that write in scripting languages all the time is what language would be best to use?

I am not worried about speed; in fact, I would have to be sure that I can slow down the script to get a user's information every 2 seconds or slower, so that I do not flood those forums.

So, to conclude, what I need in the language is this:

• Capability to extract information from pages outside the script's domain
• speed control capability
• file-creation/modification capability

What language would be the best? (I am willing to learn other languages, but the only scripting languages I have any experience with are Perl, javaScript, and PHP.)