

You already know we’re going to use Goutte for this example – spoilers from the title -, but do you know why?
#WEBSCRAPER FOR GAMES CODE#
Of course, it would require a lot of unnecessary code that we don’t really want to write. fsockopen() – which although not use for doing HTTP requests, is totally possible to do so.Just for the HTTP request, we could use several different methods like: Finally, we would want to format the data to make it more understandable – like into a CSV or JSON file.Then, we would have to parse the DOM to identify and filter the information to extract the data we need.First, we would send an HTTP request to a server to get the source code of the page.If we were going to divide web scraping into its core tasks, it would look like this: Otherwise, we would have to spend more time and write more complex code to do simple tasks like sending an HTTP request.
#WEBSCRAPER FOR GAMES DOWNLOAD#
But the most efficient way is to use a library that has built-in all the tools you need to download and parse URLs. There are plenty of ways to do web scraping in PHP. Today, we’re going to explore a few of the tools you’ll have at your disposal and do a real-life code example to build your first web scraper with PHP. If you already know PHP or you’re interested in learning a backend language with the ability to extract web data fast and efficiently, then this tutorial is for you. Until you learn all the different options you have with it.īecause it has an active community and has been around for so long, PHP has a lot of tools to make web scraping not only simpler but more powerful. With tools like Scrapy for Python or Cheerio for Node.js making web scraping simple, it’s hard to imagine why to use PHP to scrape data. However, when thinking about web scraping PHP isn’t the first option that comes to mind. Hated by many, and used for a lot of applications like WordPress.
