How to perform web crawling and data scraping in PHP?-PHP Tutorial-php.cn

How to perform web crawling and data scraping in PHP?

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Release： 2023-05-20 21:54:01

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With the advent of the Internet era, crawling and grabbing network data has become a daily job for many people. Among the programming languages that support web development, PHP has become a popular choice for web crawlers and data scraping due to its scalability and ease of use. This article will introduce how to perform web crawling and data scraping in PHP from the following aspects.

1. HTTP protocol and request implementation

Before carrying out web crawling and data crawling, you need to have a certain understanding of the HTTP protocol and request implementation. The HTTP protocol is based on the request-response model. The process of crawling web pages is the process of simulating requests and obtaining responses. In PHP, you can use the curl library to implement HTTP requests. Initialize the session through curl, set the request parameters and send the request, and then obtain the response information. The following is a simple example:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://example.com');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

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This code uses curl to implement a GET request to the URL 'https://example.com' and returns the response content. Among them, CURLOPT_URL is the requested URL, and CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER is set to true. The curl_exec() function will return the response content without directly outputting it.

2. HTML parsing

After obtaining the response content of the web page, the HTML needs to be parsed to extract the target information. In PHP, you can use third-party libraries such as Symfony's DomCrawler or Goutte to parse HTML. The following is a simple example of using DomCrawler to parse HTML:

use SymfonyComponentDomCrawlerCrawler;

$html = '<html><title>example</title><body><div class="post"><h2>Test</h2><p>Content</p></div></body></html>';
$crawler = new Crawler($html);
$title = $crawler->filter('title')->text();
$content = $crawler->filter('.post p')->text();

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This code first needs to install and import the DomCrawler library, and then initialize a Crawler object using the $html string. Then, the specified HTML element can be extracted through the filter() method, and converted into plain text by the text() method.

3. Regular expressions

In PHP, you can also use regular expressions to operate HTML text. Regular expressions are a general-purpose text matching tool that defines patterns to match specific characters, words, or patterns in text. The following is a simple example:

$html = '<html><title>example</title><body><div class="post"><h2>Test</h2><p>Content</p></div></body></html>';
preg_match('/<title>(.*)</title>/', $html, $matches);
$title = $matches[1];
preg_match('/<div class="post">(.*)</div>/', $html, $matches);
$content = $matches[1];

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This code uses the preg_match() function to match the title and content in HTML and extract the target content through the defined regular expression. It should be noted that the regular expression should be as accurate as possible to avoid ambiguous matches and accidental matches.

4. Database Operation

Data crawling usually requires storing the crawled data for subsequent analysis and use. In PHP, you can use multiple databases such as MySQL for data storage. The following is a simple MySQL database operation example:

$conn = mysqli_connect("localhost", "user", "password", "example");
if (!$conn) {
    die("Connection failed: " . mysqli_connect_error());
}
$sql = "INSERT INTO posts (title, content) VALUES ('$title', '$content')";
if (mysqli_query($conn, $sql)) {
    echo "New record created successfully";
} else {
    echo "Error: " . $sql . "<br>" . mysqli_error($conn);
}
mysqli_close($conn);

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This code uses the mysqli_connect() function to connect to the MySQL database, and then uses the mysqli_query() function to perform an insert operation to insert title and content into the posts table. It should be noted that this method has data security issues such as SQL injection, and security measures such as prepared statements should be considered.

Summary

Through the above introduction, we can understand the basic methods of web crawling and data grabbing in PHP, including the implementation of HTTP protocol and requests, HTML parsing, regular expressions and Database operations, etc. In practical applications, it is also necessary to flexibly choose appropriate methods for implementation based on the characteristics of the web page structure and target data. I believe that with the help of these methods, you will be able to crawl and scrape data more efficiently.

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