Node.js for web scraping usually is the obvious choice:

Scraping using jQuery syntax such as:

  $('table tr').each(function(ix, el) {
    names   .push($(el).find('td').eq(0));
    surnames.push($(el).find('td').eq(1));
  })

is more familiar to most web developers as opposed to the PHP syntax.

Even if Node was 5x slower than PHP I would still go for Node because of its easy jQuery syntax.

> Even if Node was 5x slower than PHP I would still go for Node because of its easy jQuery syntax

That "jQuery syntax" has nothing to do with the language itself. jQuery uses Sizzle[0], which is a CSS selector library for JavaScript. There are plenty of PHP libraries which provide CSS selectors, such as the Symfony CssSelector component[1].

[0] https://github.com/jquery/sizzle

[1] https://github.com/symfony/CssSelector