Hello Friend, Let‘s Learn Web Scraping With PHP

I‘m excited to walk you through a complete guide to web scraping with PHP. I‘ve been working with web scrapers for over 5 years, and I‘m eager to share everything I‘ve learned to help you extract and analyze data from the web.

PHP is one of the best languages to know for web scraping due to how widely used it is on the web. Over 75% of all websites use PHP in some way, so learning to scrape with it provides access to a huge amount of data.

I‘ll be with you every step of the way in this guide. By the end, you‘ll have a clear understanding of:

• Why PHP is so useful for web scraping
• How to set up your environment
• Scraping basic HTML pages
• Using advanced libraries like Goutte
• Working with paginated content
• Storing scraped data properly
• Tips for JavaScript-heavy sites
• And much more!

Let‘s get started friend!

Why Use PHP for Scraping?

I want to begin by highlighting some key advantages that make PHP a great choice for web scrapers:

Widespread Usage

As I mentioned earlier, over 75% of all websites use PHP in some way according to W3Techs. It powers popular platforms like WordPress, Facebook, Wikipedia and more.

This widespread usage means that PHP scrapping libraries and tools are plentiful. There are many existing code examples and tutorials available as well.

Built-in Functions

PHP contains many built-in functions that are useful for web scraping tasks including:

• file_get_contents() – Downloads raw HTML/text from a URL
• DOMDocument – Parses HTML and allows DOM traversal
• preg_match() – Applies regular expression pattern matching

These functions provide a quick starting point before needing more robust third-party tools.

Fast Execution

Since PHP is compiled down to bytecode and executed natively, it‘s very fast for simple scraping scripts.

Benchmark tests show PHP matching or exceeding the speeds of Python and NodeJS in many cases. When scraping large volumes of pages, this performance boost is valuable.

Open Source

PHP is freely available under open source licenses. The raw engine is written in C which is also open source.

This means PHP can run on virtually any platform from Windows to Linux to macOS and more. You can be sure your web scrapers will work across operating systems.

The open source nature also fosters collaboration and transparency from the large PHP community.

Easy to Learn

While languages like Python take some time to properly grasp concepts like indentation rules, PHP has a relatively gentle learning curve by comparison.

The syntax is loosely based on C/C++ so it uses standard braces for blocks and semicolons to terminate lines. Variables do not require type declarations.

This simplicity helps new developers start scraping the web quicker compared to other languages.

Now that you understand the benefits, let‘s look at setting up a scraping environment.

Prerequisites to Start Scraping

Before we start writing PHP code to scrape the web, you‘ll want to have your environment configured properly:

PHP 7.1 or Above

I recommend using the latest available PHP version which is currently 8.x at the time I‘m writing this guide. However, PHP 7.1 or above should have the necessary features.

Older versions may not support critical functions we need. You can check your installed PHP version by running:

php -v

If you need to upgrade, I suggest using a package manager for your operating system like Homebrew on macOS or Chocolatey on Windows.

Composer

Composer is the package manager for PHP that allows you to install third-party libraries. We‘ll use it later to get more advanced scraping tools.

You can download the Composer PHAR archive from getcomposer.org and execute it globally like so:

php composer.phar install

Or if you have curl:

curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Once installed, verify it works via:

composer --version

This will be essential for streamlining dependencies.

cURL Extension

cURL allows PHP to transfer data using various network protocols. It‘s usually included by default with PHP installations.

Test for it with:

if (!extension_loaded(‘curl‘)) {
  echo ‘cURL extension required!‘;
  exit;
} 

If missing, research installing it for your system. It can be compiled from source or may be an optional package.

DOM Extension

The DOM (Document Object Model) extension parses HTML and XML documents into a traversable structure. This allows querying elements by ID, class name, tag name etc.

Verify it is active:

if (!extension_loaded(‘dom‘)) {
  echo ‘DOM extension required!‘;
  exit; 
}

Like cURL, research installing it if needed.

With the prerequisites checked off, you have a web scraping ready PHP environment!

Scraping Simple Sites with file_get_contents()

For basic web pages that don‘t require complex interaction, PHP‘s built-in file_get_contents() function can retrieve the raw HTML:

$html = file_get_contents(‘http://example.com/‘);

This will download the full source code of the page as a string. You can then process it further based on your needs.

Let‘s try an example with books.toscrape.com:

$html = file_get_contents(‘http://books.toscrape.com/‘);

// Extract title 
preg_match(‘/<title>(.*)<\/title>/‘, $html, $matches);
echo $matches[1]; 

// Find all product names
preg_match_all(‘/<h3>(.*?)<\/h3>/‘, $html, $matches);
print_r($matches[1]);

This uses regular expressions to search through the HTML and extract the