Web scraping using PHP

web-scraping-using-php

Web scraping (web harvesting or web data extraction) is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites.
Source Wikipedia

In very simple words, scraping is extracting data from web page by processing HTML and it is extremely powerful. It is used for various purposes such as analyzing web pages, data aggregation from multiple sources, researching trends and many more.

Web scraping using php

Before starting scraping with php one should have basic knowledge of domdocument and curl.
Let’s being with an example, for website wiredskill.com, it’s a tech news aggregator, we have to do as follows.

  • get title and title length
  • get meta description
  • get all h1 tags
  • get all links from the page

Steps to follow

  • get page content using curl
  • load content in dom document
  • if title exists, get title and it’s length
  • if meta description exits, get meta description
  • get h1 tags and links

All in all, web scraping with php is very easy, so do scraping just for fun because it breaches most of the website policies. Therefore, i really recommend to use it wisely after reading all terms and conditions of the website you are targeting to collect data.

This article is just to give knowledge about scraping, we are not responsible for any harm caused by using above script to any website by anyone.