Web Scraping for PHP developers

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Web Scraping for PHP developers

a practical guide

About the Book

This book is a practical, pragmatic and lightweight guide to web scraping for PHP developers.Web Scraping - getting a program to capture information from online sources - is one of the most powerful techniques for grabbing content without a browser.

Web Scraping for PHP developers introduces you to a range of scraping techniques using PHP to retrieve online content. You’ll be scraping within 10 minutes of reading the first few chapters. You will also learn methods to scrape authenticated content that requires login or sessions. Also, you will learn to submit and parse Ajax data streams, which would normally be not possible with simple scraping programs.

About the Author

sameer borate
sameer borate

Sameer Borate lives in Pune, India and works as an independent consultant, specialising in web development.

Websites: http://www.codediesel.com

Table of Contents

  • 1. Understanding Web Scraping
    • 1.1 Web Scraping Defined
    • 1.2 Reasons to scrape
    • 1.3 Legality of Web Scraping
  • 2. HTTP: A QUICK OVERVIEW
    • 2.1 HTTP Overview
      • 2.1.1 GET Requests
      • 2.1.2 Query Strings
      • 2.1.3 POST Requests
      • 2.1.4 URL Syntax
      • 2.1.5 HTTP State Management and Cookies
  • 3. Scraping Toolbox
    • 3.1 Your Scraping Toolbox
      • 3.1.1 PHP cURL:
      • 3.1.2 SimpleHTMLDOM: A quick overview
      • 3.1.3 Caching downloaded pages
      • 3.1.4 Debugging cURL
  • 4. Exploring SimpleHTMLDOM
    • 4.1 Simplehtmldom in detail
      • 4.1.1 Building the initial DOM
      • 4.1.2 Grabbing the text content of a page
      • 4.1.3 Finding elements on a page
      • 4.1.4 Iterating over nested elements
      • 4.1.5 Scraping HTML tables
      • 4.1.6 DOM Parents and Children
      • 4.1.7 Chaining methods
      • 4.1.8 Downloading Images
      • 4.1.9 WGET
  • 5. Scraping Authenticated Pages
    • 5.1 Authenticated sites
      • 5.1.1 HTTP Basic Authentication
      • 5.1.2 HTTP Basic Authentication with cURL
      • 5.1.3 Storing and sending cookies
      • 5.1.4 Session Authentication
      • 5.1.5 Logging to a WordPress Admin site with curl
  • 6. Scraping with Regular Expressions
    • 6.1 Regular Expressions: A quick Introduction
      • 6.1.1 Getting the character encoding for a web page
      • 6.1.2 Grabbing images from a web page
  • 7. Scraping Ajax Content
    • 7.1 JavaScript and the rise of Ajax
      • 7.1.1 FireBug to the rescue
    • 7.2 PhantomJS
  • 8. Using Proxies
    • 8.1 Using proxies for scraping
      • 8.2 Proxies with cURL
  • 9. Scheduling your Scrapers
    • 9.1 Running your scraping at regular intervals
    • 9.2 Ensuring that the CRON job is active
  • 10. Cookbook
    • 10.1 Get character encoding for a web page
    • 10.2 Grabbing website favicons
    • 10.3 Scrape Google search results
    • 10.4 Get Alexa global site rank
    • 10.5 Scraping a page with HTTP authentication
    • 10.6 Logging to WordPress admin and grabbing content
    • 10.7 Getting all the image urls from a page
    • 10.8 Saving all the images from a page to a directory
  • 11. cURL Options
    • A.1 A simple CURL session
      • A.1.1 Setting CURL Options
  • 12. HTTP Status Codes

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