Php Curl Web Scraping



  1. Php Curl Web Scraping Tutorial
  2. Php Curl Get
  3. Php Curl Web Scraping With Javascript Api Key
  4. Using Curl In Php
Php Curl Web Scraping

Php Curl Web Scraping Tutorial

In this article, I will discuss how to download and save image files with PHP/cURL web scraper. I will use email extractor script created earlier as example. With some modification, the same script can then be used to extract product information and images from Internet shopping websites such as eba. PHP CURL Tutorial Made Easy For Beginners GRAB MY COURSE Do you want to become. Source AdBlocker Detected Please support this website by disabling your AdBlocker.

The DOMXPath class is a convenient and popular means to parse HTML content with XPath.
After I’ve done a simple PHP/cURL scraper using Regex some have reasonably mentioned a request for a more efficient scrape with XPath. So, instead of parsing the content with Regex, I used DOMXPath class methods.

Parsing content by XPath takes more content preparation, I think. XPath’s approach (for HTML-XML structures) to parsing is much less time and resource consuming compared to Regex parsing.

If you have a small set of HTML pages that you want to scrape data from and then to stuff into a database, Regexes might work fine… this works well for a limited, one-time job (from community Wiki).

If we are to apply XPath methods then, after we upload a content, we had better brush it up to prepare for export into DOM and DOMXPath objects.

Here I’ve summed the basic steps to be done with DOMXPath class usage:

Php Curl Get

  1. Initialize a DOMDocument class instance from page content (work with HTML as with XML)
  2. Initialize a DOMXPath class instance from DOMDocument class instance.
  3. Parse the DOMXPath object.
1. Initializing a DOMDocument class instance from page content
  • create a new DOMDocument class instance

Php Curl Web Scraping With Javascript Api Key

When using this function be sure to clear your internal error buffer ( libxml_clear_errors() ). If you don’t and you use this in a long running process, you may find that all your memory is used up. Outsourced from here. See the ‘enable user error handling’ bullet point.

  • load the HTML text into the DOMDocument object
  • enable user error handling

Now the DOMDocument object (named ‘$DOM’) contains all the target text as a HTML DOM structure. It’s ready for different methods and properties to be applied.

2. Initializing a DOMXPath object from the DOMDocument object
  • Initialize DOMXPath object for further parse
Php Curl Web Scraping

Now XPath methods are applicable to the content

Parsing the DOMXPath object

As a test page I took the Blocks Testing Ground page and wrote a code using XPath to retrieve data.

Php curl get https
How libxml library reacts to a malformed HTML

The libxml library gave no warning about a malformed HTML non-related to the direct DOM structure parse, yet the library has issued an error for the malformed HTML instance that is the subject of a direct parse:

  • No warning for this case: <p><p><p>
  • For a missed bracket: <div prod=’name1′ <div …> and then for the extra opened tag: <div prod=’name1′ ><div> the library has issued an exception for the DOMXPath ‘query’ method.

Using Curl In Php

The whole scraper listing