How to quickly implement automated crawlers using PHP and Selenium

With the development of the Internet, crawler technology is widely used in all walks of life. Automated crawlers are widely used in data collection and website testing. This article will introduce how to quickly implement automated crawlers using PHP and Selenium.

1. Introduction to Selenium

Selenium is an automated testing tool that is widely used for testing web applications. Selenium IDE is a web application testing tool, and Selenium WebDriver is a browser-driven automated testing tool that provides interfaces for many programming languages, including Java, C#, Python, and PHP.

Selenium WebDriver is tested based on the browser. It can control the behavior of the browser and simulate the user's operation behavior of the web application. Using Selenium WebDriver, we can easily perform web automation testing and web data collection.

2. PHP uses Selenium WebDriver

Install Selenium WebDriver for PHP

First, we need to install Selenium WebDriver for PHP. Selenium WebDriver for PHP can be easily installed using Composer. Create a composer.json file in the root directory of your project and add the following content:

{

"name": "myproject",
"description": "Using Selenium WebDriver for PHP",
"require": {
    "php-webdriver/webdriver": "~1.4.0"
}

}

After saving the file, you can install it by entering the following command on the command line:

composer install

This will automatically install the necessary components.

Using Selenium WebDriver for PHP

After the installation is complete, we can start using Selenium WebDriver for PHP for automated testing and Web data collection. First, we need to introduce the implementation class of WebDriver:

require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';

use FacebookWebDriverRemoteCapabilities;
use FacebookWebDriverRemoteWebDriverBrowserType;
use FacebookWebDriverRemoteRemoteWebDriver;

Here we use the WebDriver for PHP library developed by Facebook and implement it by introducing the above code.

Now, we can use the RemoteWebDriver interface to connect to the browser for automated operations.

$host = 'http://localhost:4444/wd/hub';
$capabilities = array(WebDriverBrowserType::CHROME);
$driver = RemoteWebDriver::create($host , new Capabilities($capabilities));

Here, we choose the Chrome browser, connect to the browser through the create method, and then use the WebDriver interface to call the browser method to implement automated testing and Web Data collected.

3. Implement automated crawlers

Next, we use Selenium WebDriver for PHP to implement automated crawlers.

1. Determine the target website

First, we need to determine the target website that needs to be crawled. Here we take "Cheese Network" as an example. This website provides free online viewing of the complete collection of Hong Kong and Taiwan films. We need to obtain the film and television resource information in this website.

2. Confirm crawling target

Before crawling data, we need to confirm what data needs to be crawled. In this example, we need to obtain the film and television title, director, actors, year, plot summary and other information.

3. Write code

After confirming the goal, we can write the relevant code. The following code is to obtain the detailed information of the specified movie name:

$movieName = 'YourMovieName';

// New RemoteWebDriver instance to connect with Chrome browser
$browser = RemoteWebDriver::create ($host, new Capabilities($capabilities));
$browser->manage()->timeouts()->implicitlyWait(10);

// Open the target website
$browser->get('http://www.zhishi8.com/film/')

// Find the search box and submit the query
$searchBox = $browser-> ;findElement(WebDriverBy::id('wd'));
$searchBox->sendKeys($movieName);
$searchBox->submit();

// Wait for the result page to load
$browser->wait()->until(

WebDriverExpectedCondition::titleContains($movieName)

);

// Click the found movie link and wait for the detail page to load
$movieLink = $browser->findElement(WebDriverBy::xpath("//a[contains(@href, '/film/{$name}.html')]"));
$ movieLink->click();
$browser->wait()->until(

WebDriverExpectedCondition::titleContains($movieName)

);

// Get the movie detail information
$ movieDirector = $browser->findElement(WebDriverBy::xpath("//p[contains(@class, 'lh30') and contains(text(), 'director')]"))->getText();
$movieActor = $browser->findElement(WebDriverBy::xpath("//p[contains(@class, 'lh30') and contains(text(), 'starring')]"))-> getText();
$movieYear = $browser->findElement(WebDriverBy::xpath("//p[contains(@class, 'lh30') and contains(text(), 'Year')]") )->getText();
$movieDetail = $browser->findElement(WebDriverBy::xpath("//p[contains(@class, 'txt lh25')]))->getText() ;

// Output the result
echo "Movie Name: {$movieName}
";
echo "Director: {$movieDirector}
";
echo " Actor: {$movieActor}
";
echo "Year: {$movieYear}
";
echo "Detail: {$movieDetail}
";

Pass With PHP and Selenium, we can easily implement automated crawlers to get the data we need.

4. Summary

This article introduces how to quickly implement automated crawlers using PHP and Selenium. First, we introduced the basic knowledge and installation method of Selenium WebDriver. Then, we explained how to use PHP and Selenium WebDriver to implement automated crawlers through examples. Finally, we summarize the content of this article and hope it will be helpful to you.

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