Web Scraping for PHP developers
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
Table of Contents
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1. Understanding Web Scraping
- 1.1 Web Scraping Defined
- 1.2 Reasons to scrape
- 1.3 Legality of Web Scraping
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2. HTTP: A QUICK OVERVIEW
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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
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2.1 HTTP Overview
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3. Scraping Toolbox
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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
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3.1 Your Scraping Toolbox
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4. Exploring SimpleHTMLDOM
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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
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4.1 Simplehtmldom in detail
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5. Scraping Authenticated Pages
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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
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5.1 Authenticated sites
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6. Scraping with Regular Expressions
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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
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6.1 Regular Expressions: A quick Introduction
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7. Scraping Ajax Content
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7.1 JavaScript and the rise of Ajax
- 7.1.1 FireBug to the rescue
- 7.2 PhantomJS
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7.1 JavaScript and the rise of Ajax
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8. Using Proxies
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8.1 Using proxies for scraping
- 8.2 Proxies with cURL
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8.1 Using proxies for scraping
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9. Scheduling your Scrapers
- 9.1 Running your scraping at regular intervals
- 9.2 Ensuring that the CRON job is active
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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
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11. cURL Options
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A.1 A simple CURL session
- A.1.1 Setting CURL Options
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A.1 A simple CURL session
- 12. HTTP Status Codes
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