Php Web Scraping Example



Nov 14, 2019 Scrapestack API enables you to scrape data from the website in realtime. Scrapestack provides easy-to-use REST API that extracts data from a website without any programming and restriction with IP blocks, CAPTCHA, or geolocations. In this tutorial, we will show you how to integrate Web Scraping API with Scrapestack REST API using PHP. I’ve recently had to perform some web scraping from a site that required login. It wasn’t very straight forward as I expected so I’ve decided to write a tutorial for it. For this tutorial we will scrape a list of projects from our bitbucket account. The code from this tutorial can be found on my Github. We will perform the following steps. Note: This is the default behaviour: If a tag wasn't found because it's missing in the source HTML, null will be returned. If an iteratable item is empty (e.g. Scraping images from a page without images), an empty array will be returned. Cara simple web scraper php menggunakan PHP HTML DOM Parserlink tutorial https://goo.gl/GntHXV. Maka dari itu, kita membutuhkan sebuah automation tool untuk melakukannya, inilah fungsi dari web scraping. Perlu diketahui, web scraping bisa dilakukan di berbagai bahasa pemrograman. Di tutorial kali ini, kita akan mencobanya menggunakan PHP.

As a PHP programmer, we often need to get some data from another website for some purpose. Getting data from another websites is known as web scraping. Scrapping website data is not an easy task as it creates many challenges.

So if you’re looking for solution to scrape data, then you’re here at the right place. In this tutorial you will learn how to scrape data from website using PHP.

The tutorial is explained in easy steps with live demo and download demo source code.

So let’s start the coding. We will have following file structure for data scraping tutorial

  • index.php
  • scrape.js

Steps1: Create Form To Enter Website URL
As we will handle this tutorial with demo, so first we will create From in index.php with submit button to enter website URL to scrape data.


Php Web Scraping Example Interview

ScrapingPhp Web Scraping Example

Steps2: Create PHP Function Get Website Data
Now we will create a PHP function scrapeWebsiteData in scrape.php to get website data using PHP cURL library that allows you to connect and communicate to many different types of servers with many different types of protocols.

In above function, we are checking whether PHP cURL is installed or not. Here we have used three cURL functions curl_init() initializes the session, curl_exec() executes, and curl_close() to close connection. The variable CURLOPT_URL is used to set the website URL that we scrapping. The second CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER is used to tell to store scraped page in a variable rather than its default, which is to simply display the entire page as it is.

Steps3: Scrape Particular Data from Website
Now finally we will handle functionality to scrape particular section of page. As mostly we don’t want all data from page, just need section of page or data. So here in this example, we will look for latest posts at PHPZAG.COM. For this we will pass that particular section from which we start getting data and end point. Here we have have used CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER variable to that particular scraped section of page.

if(isset($_POST['submit'])){
$html = scrapeWebsiteData($_POST['website_url']);
$start_point = strpos($html, '<h3>Latest Posts</h3>');
$end_point = strpos($html, '</div>', $start_point);
$length = $end_point-$start_point;
$html = substr($html, $start_point, $length);
echo $html;
}

Now have a list of latest posts from PHPZAG.COM. This is really a simple example to get that particular section of page. You can go further to get useful data from websites according to your requirement. For example, you can scrape data from eCommerce websites to get product details, price etc. The point is, once the website data in your hands, you can do whatever you want.


You can view the live demo from the Demo link and can download the script from the Download link below.
DemoDownload

Php scraping library

The scraping of links works very similar to image scraping. You can retrieve a list of URL without any additional information as well as a detailed list containing rel, target as well as other attributes.

# Simple Link List

Php Website Scraping Script

The following example parses a web-page for links and returns an array of absolute URLs:

If the page shouldn't contain any links, an empty array is returned.

# Links with Details

If you are in need of more details you can access these in a similar way as on the images. Below is an example to access the detailed data of the first link on the page:

Windows downloads. If you require more data, you will either need to extend the library or submit an issue for consideration.

# Internal Links and External Links

PHPScraper allows to return only internal or external links. The internal links include links both the same root-domain as well as any sub-domain. If you are in need to get only the links within the exact sub-domain use subdomainLinks instead. The following demonstrates both:

# Sub-domain Links

If you need you retrieve only links on the exact sub-domain you can use the subdomainLinks-method:

WARNING

What Is Web Scraping

This might case issues when a site mixes links with and without 'www', as www is considered a sub-domain.