florence/scrapa

A simple php web scraper package

WebScrapa

DISCLAIMER

This package was put together for learning purposes only., _(*1)

, _(*2)

, _(*3)

A simple PHP web scraper package -, _(*4)

Most websites do not offer the functionality to save a copy of the data which they display to your computer. The only option then is to manually copy and paste the data displayed by the website in your browser to a local file in your computer - a very tedious job which can take many hours or sometimes days to complete. Web Scraping is the technique of automating this process., _(*5)

WebScrapa is a simple web scraper package written with PHP. It uses cURL to request and download a webpage. The downloaded webpage is converted to XML DOM object and XPath is used to navigate through elements in the XML DOM object., _(*6)

Installation

composer require "florence/scrapa: v1.0"

Usage

• Create an instance of the Scrap class:, _(*7)

  $url = 'https://www.youtubecom/JustinBieber/about';
  $query = '//ul[@class="about-custom-links"]//a[@class="about-channel-link "]/@href';
  
  $scrap = new Scrap($url, $query);

Learn about XPath and how to scrape the elements based on their tags and attributes, such as CSS classes and IDs. https://goo.gl/Gjd3R3, _(*8)

• Use the toArrayScrapDOM method to get the results of your query in array format, _(*9)

  print_r($scrap->toArrayScrapDOM());

• Use the toStringScrapDOM method to get the results of your query in string format, _(*10)

  print_r($scrap->toStringScrapDOM())

Run the example file

clone the repo, _(*11)

git clone https://github.com/andela-fokosun/webscrapa

run, _(*12)

composer install

from your terminal, run:, _(*13)

php example.php

run tests, _(*14)

vendor/bin/phpunit