Using PHP to grab awstats data

I know there's got to be a way to grab the data, but I'm wondering if someone has already done something like this.

My site is starting to get a lot of traffic, and I'd like to have a CRON job run every day that grabs the number of hits for the previous 24 hours.

Then I'll add it to the homepage on a little tab that says "(42,883) hits in the last 24 hours!"

Does anyone have any experience with grabbing data from tracking systems like that?

Thanks!

 

Why don't you use web counters that are freely available ?

 

I'd prefer to have it written once a day by a CRON job, and not use any third party code.

I'm actually getting a bit closer to a solution - the hard part is parsing out the required data.