![]() Each day of the year has its own page for historical events, including birthdays! When we open, for example, the page for December 10th (which happens to be my birthday), we can inspect the HTML in the developer console and see how the "Births" section is structured: Let's look at Wikipedia as our first data provider. ![]() ![]() Strings, regular expressions, and Wikipedia ![]() Great! Now let's get to actual scraping! 2. Plus, there are quite a few additional options and flags to support other use-cases. If, for example, we wanted cURL to automatically handle HTTP redirect 30x codes, we'd only need to add curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true). Instead we only initialise the cURL handle, pass the actual URL, and perform the request using curl_exec. Now, this already looks less low-level than our previous example, doesn't it? No need to manually compose the HTTP request, establish and manage the TCP connection, or handle the response byte-by-byte. Close cURL resource to free up system resources Send the request and store the result in $responseĮcho 'HTTP Status Code: '. Return the response instead of printing it outĬurl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1) Initialize a connection with cURL (ch = cURL handle, or "channel")Ĭurl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'GET') Let's jump right into the code, it's quite straight forward: While one can handle HTTP tasks with it, it's not fun and requires a lot of boilerplate code that we don't need to write - performing HTTP requests is a solved problem, and in PHP (and many other languages) it's solved by… cURL just kidding! But in all seriousness: fsockopen() is usually not used to perform HTTP requests in PHP I just wanted to show you that it's possible, using the easiest possible example. Next step: performing an HTTP request with Assembler. As long as the server returns something to us.Īnd indeed, if you put this code snippet into a file fsockopen.php and run it with php fsockopen.php, you will see the same HTML that you get when you open in your browser. The information stream can flow, and we can write and read from it We open a connection to on the port 80 = " \r\n " // We need to add a last new line after the last header HTTP requires "\r\n" In HTTP, lines have to be terminated with "\r\n" because of If you want to code along, please ensure that you have installed a current version of PHP and Composer.Ĭreate a new directory and run the following commands from it: Please keep in mind that there is no general "best way" - each approach has its use-case, depending on what you need, how you like to do things, and what you want to achieve.Īs an example, we will try to get a list of people that share the same birthday, as you can see, for instance, on. In this article, we'll look at some ways to scrape the web with PHP. You might have seen one of our other tutorials on how to scrape websites, for example with Ruby, JavaScript or Python, and wondered: what about the most widely used server-side programming language for websites, which, at the same time, is the one of the most dreaded? Wonder no more - today it's time for PHP ?!īelieve it or not, but PHP and web scraping have much in common: just like PHP, web scraping can be used either in a quick and dirty way, or in a more elaborate fashion and supported with the help of additional tools and services.
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