Web scraping with PHP: Step-by-step tutorial

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In this article, you’ll learn to build a PHP web scraper, from the basics to more advanced techniques. By zenrows.com.

While PHP is more commonly used for web development, it’s perfectly good for scraping thanks to its scripting ability and built-in HTTP clients like cURL, which support proxy configuration. On top of that, PHP has many web scraping libraries, including HTTP clients like Guzzle and cURL, HTML parsers like Simple DOM Parser and DiDOM, and headless browsers like the PHP WebDriver.

The article then reads about:

  • Set up the environment (PHP 8.3+)
  • Set up a PHP project
  • How to scrape a website in PHP
  • Retrieve the HTML of your target page
  • Get data from one element
  • Get data from all elements
  • Export your data to a CSV file

Web scraping at scale involves a few more advanced methods and concepts, including crawling, dealing with dynamic content, and bypassing anti-bot measures. In this section, you’ll learn more about each of them. Code examples and links to further reading also in the article. Nice one!

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Tags php app-development infosec web-development