Php Web Scraping Example

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Use PHP for your web scraping if the rest of your application (that’s going to use the result of this web scraping) is written in PHP. Scraping with PHP is not so easy that I’d plan to use it in the middle of Python web project, for example. The PHP scraping libraries are quite good, but they’re not amazing. Reasons to Avoid PHP Web.

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.

Php Web Scraping Example
  • This video covers pulling HTML elements from the DOM programmatically using PHP.If you want to do one of the following actions:- Receive 1 on 1 mentoring fro.
  • 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.

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.


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

The Web Scraping API allows the developer to scrape data from the website in a structured format. It returns realtime data from the websites based on the web page URL specified in the API settings. The Web Scraping API is very useful when you want to extract content from the HTML source of the web pages.

There are various Web Scraping API available to scrape the webpage data, Scrapestack is one of the best free Web Scraping API among them. 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.

Follow the below simple steps to integrate Web Scraping API with scrapestack in PHP.

Get API Access Key

1. Before getting started, create an account on scrapestack.

2. In the dashboard, you will get the API key under the Your API Access Key.

API Configuration

The Access Key is required to authenticate and access the scrapestack API.

  • Build the query string using http_build_query() function to pass required params in the scrapestack API.
  • Specify the API Access Key in the access_key parameter.
  • Specify the webpage URL in the url parameter.

Make HTTP GET Request

Php Scraping Library

To scrape content from the website, call Web Scraping API via HTTP GET request using cURL in PHP.

HTTPS Encryption:
To make secure API requests use HTTPS (SSL) encryption by calling API URL begins with https.

Scraping Website Content

After a successful API request, the webpage content will be returned in a structured format.

Web Scraping Tools

Example Code to Scrape Content from Website via scrapestack API

The following are the complete code to extract webpage content using PHP.

Conclusion

The scrapestack API is free to use, there also premium plans are available for advanced uses. In the example code, we have used some required parameters for Web Scraping API call. Various configuration options are available in scrapestack API, you can use these to customize the scraping data. For a complete reference, see the documentation of scrapestack API.

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