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PHPScraper is a versatile web-utility for PHP. Its primary objective is to streamline the process of extracting information from websites, allowing you to focus on accomplishing tasks without getting caught up in the complexities of selectors, data structure preparation, and conversion.
Under the hood, it uses
- BrowserKit (formerly Goutte) to access the web
- League/URI to process URLs
- donatello-za/rake-php-plus to extract and analyze keywords
See composer.json for more details.
Here are a few impressions of the way the library works. More examples are this website in the various sections.
All scraping functionality can be accessed either as a function call or a property call. For example, the title can be accessed in two ways:
// Prep
$web = new \Spekulatius\PHPScraper\PHPScraper;
$web->go('https://google.com');
// Returns "Google"
echo $web->title;
// Also returns "Google"
echo $web->title();Many common use cases are covered already. You can find prepared extractors for various HTML tags, including interesting attributes. You can filter and combine these to your needs. In some cases there is an option to get a simple or detailed version, here in the case of linksWithDetails:
$web = new \Spekulatius\PHPScraper\PHPScraper;
// Contains:
// <a href="https://placekitten.com/456/500" rel="ugc">
// <img src="https://placekitten.com/456/400">
// <img src="https://placekitten.com/456/300">
// </a>
$web->go('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/links/image-urls.html');
// Get the first link on the page and print the result
print_r($web->linksWithDetails[0]);
// [
// 'url' => 'https://placekitten.com/456/500',
// 'protocol' => 'https',
// 'text' => '',
// 'title' => null,
// 'target' => null,
// 'rel' => 'ugc',
// 'image' => [
// 'https://placekitten.com/456/400',
// 'https://placekitten.com/456/300'
// ],
// 'isNofollow' => false,
// 'isUGC' => true,
// 'isSponsored' => false,
// 'isMe' => false,
// 'isNoopener' => false,
// 'isNoreferrer' => false,
// ]::: tip Null If there aren't any matching elements (here links) on the page, an empty array will be returned.
For methods that normally return a single string (e.g. title), null will be returned in this case.
:::
Details such as follow_redirects, etc. are optional configuration parameters (see below).
Most of the DOM should be covered using these methods:
- several meta-tags and other
<head>-information - Social-Media information like Twitter Card and Facebook Open Graph
- Content: Headings, Outline, Texts and Lists
- Keywords
- Images & Links.
More examples are included in the tests.
Besides processing the content on the page itself, you can download files using fetchAsset:
// Absolute URL
$csvString = $web->fetchAsset('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/test.csv');
// Relative URL after navigation
$csvString = $web
->go('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/meta/lorem-ipsum.html')
->fetchAsset('/test.csv');You will only need to write the content into a file or cloud storage.
::: warning 404s If the intended URL isn't available an exception will be thrown. Make sure to handle this case by wrapping your code in a try-catch block:
try {
// ...
} catch (\Exception $e) {
// ...
}:::
PHPScraper can assist in collecting feeds such as RSS feeds, sitemap.xml-entries and static search indexes. This can be useful when deciding on the next page to crawl or build up a list of pages on a website.
Here we are processing the sitemap into a set of FeedEntry-DTOs:
(new \Spekulatius\PHPScraper\PHPScraper)
->go('https://phpscraper.de')
->sitemap
// array(131) {
// [0]=>
// object(spekulatius\DataTransferObjects\FeedEntry)#165 (3) {
// ["title"]=>
// string(0) ""
// ["description"]=>
// string(0) ""
// ["link"]=>
// string(22) "https://phpscraper.de/"
// }
// [1]=>
// ...::: tip Fallback-Methods
Whenever post-processing is applied, you can fall back to the underlying *Raw-methods.
:::
PHPScraper comes out-of-the-box with file / URL processing methods for CSV-, XML- and JSON:
parseJsonparseXmlparseCsvparseCsvWithHeader(generates an asso. array using the first row)
Each method can process both strings as well as URLs:
// Parse JSON into array:
$json = $web->parseJson('[{"title": "PHP Scraper: a web utility for PHP", "url": "https://phpscraper.de"}]');
// [
// 'title' => 'PHP Scraper: a web utility for PHP',
// 'url' => 'https://phpscraper.de'
// ]
// Fetch and parse CSV into a simple array:
$csv = $web->parseCsv('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/test.csv');
// [
// ['date', 'value'],
// ['1945-02-06', 4.20],
// ['1952-03-11', 42],
// ]
// Fetch and parse CSV with first row as header into an asso. array structure:
$csv = $web->parseCsvWithHeader('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/test.csv');
// [
// ['date' => '1945-02-06', 'value' => 4.20],
// ['date' => '1952-03-11', 'value' => 42],
// ]::: tip Additional CSV parsing parameters Additional CSV parsing parameters such as separator, enclosure and escape are possible. :::
There are plenty of examples on the PHPScraper website and in the tests.
Check the playground.php if you prefer learning by doing. You get it up and running with:
$ git clone git@github.com:spekulatius/PHPScraper.git && composer updateThe future development is organized into milestones. Releases follow semver.
- Improve documentation and examples.
- Organize code better (move websites into separate repos, etc.)
- Add support for feeds and some typical file types.
- Expand to parse a wider range of types, elements, embeds, etc.
- Improve performance with caching and concurrent fetching of assets
- Minor improvements for parsing methods
TBC.
PHPScraper is proudly supported by:
If you find PHPScraper useful to your work or simply want to support the development, please consider a sponsorship or donation. Thank you 💪
If needed, you can use the following configuration options:
You can set the browser agent using setConfig:
$web->setConfig([
'agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:107.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/107.0'
]);It defaults to Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PHP Scraper/1.x; +https://phpscraper.de).
You can configure proxy support with setConfig:
$web->setConfig(['proxy' => 'http://user:password@127.0.0.1:3128']);::: tip If you're looking for decent prices residential proxy, check IProyal. :::
You can set the timeout using setConfig:
$web->setConfig(['timeout' => 15]);Setting the timeout to zero will disable it.
While unrecommended, it might be required to disable SSL checks. You can do so using:
$web->setConfig(['disable_ssl' => true]);You can call setConfig multiple times. It stores the config and merges it with previous settings. This should be kept in mind in the unlikely use-case when unsetting values.
composer require spekulatius/phpscraperAfter the installation, the package will be picked up by the Composer autoloader. If you are using a common PHP application or framework such as Laravel or Symfony you can start scraping now 🚀
If you are using a framework such as Laravel, Symfony, Laminas, Phalcon, or CakePHP, you won't need this step. The autoloader is automatically included.
If not or you are building a standalone-scraper, please include the autoloader in vendor/ at the top of your file:
<?php
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
// ...Now you can now use any of the examples on the documentation website or from the tests/-folder.
Please consider supporting PHPScraper with a star or sponsorship:
composer thanksThank you 💪
The library comes with a PHPUnit test suite. To run the tests, run the following command from the project folder:
composer testYou can find the tests here. The test pages are publicly available.
This being said, there are probably edge cases that aren't working and may cause trouble. If you find one, please raise a bug on GitHub.
Before you get started, make yourself familiar with the contribution guidelines. Feel free to reach out if questions come up.