Well, the title of this article pretty much explains it all. If you're in getting started with web scraping by PHP, read on for overview of PHP frameworks to help with that!
Web scraping is something developers encounter on a daily basis.
There could be different needs as far as each scraping task is concerned. It could be a product or stock pricing.
In backend development, web scraping is quite popular. There are people who keep creating quality parsers and scrapers.
In this post, we will explore some of the libraries which can enable scraping websites and storing data in a manner that could be useful for your immediate needs.
In PHP, you can do scraping with some of these libraries:
- Laravel 7
- cURL
- Guzzle
- Faker
- dom-crawler
- Redis
- MySQL 8
- TTProxy
1. Laravel 7
Description:
Laravel is an open-source PHP framework, which is robust and easy to understand. Laravel 7 includes many new features including Laravel Airlock, better routing speed, custom Eloquent casts, Blade component tags, fluent string operations, a new HTTP client, CORS support, and many more features.
Requirements:
The Laravel framework has a few system requirements.
- PHP >= 7.2.5
- BCMath PHP Extension
- Ctype PHP Extension
- Fileinfo PHP extension
- JSON PHP Extension
- Mbstring PHP Extension
- OpenSSL PHP Extension
- PDO PHP Extension
- Tokenizer PHP Extension
- XML PHP Extension
Documentation:
2. cURL
Description:
cURL is well-known as one of the most popular libraries (a built-in PHP component) for extracting data from web pages.There is no requirement to include third-party files and classes as it is a standardized PHP-library.
Requirements:
When you want to use PHP's cURL functions, all you need do is install the » libcurl package. PHP will need libcurl version 7.10.5 or later.
Documentation:
http://php.net/manual/ru/book.curl.php
3. Guzzle
Description:
Guzzle is useful because it is a PHP HTTP client which enables you to send HTTP requests in an easy manner. It is also easy to integrate with web services.
Features:
It has a simple interface which helps you build query strings, POST requests, streaming large uploads, stream large downloads, use HTTP cookies, upload JSON data, etc.
It can send both synchronous and asynchronous requests with the help of the same interface.
It makes use of PSR-7 interfaces for requests, responses, and streams. This enables you to utilize other PSR-7 compatible libraries with Guzzle.
It can abstract away the underlying HTTP transport, enabling you to write environment and transport agnostic code; i.e., no hard dependency on cURL, PHP streams, sockets, or non-blocking event loops.
Middleware system enables you to augment and compose client behavior.
Requirements:
Requires PHP version 5.3.3+.
Documentation:
http://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/stable/
4. Faker
Description:
Faker is a PHP library that generates fake data for you. You can use this library to generates User-Agent.
Requirements:
Requires PHP version 5.3.3+.
Documentation:
https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker
5. dom-crawler
Description:
The DomCrawler component eases DOM navigation for HTML and XML documents.
Requirements:
Requires PHP version 7.2.5+.
Documentation:
https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/dom_crawler.html
6. Redis
Description:
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker.
Requirements:
Requires Redis client for PHP project.
Documentation:
https://redis.io/documentation
7. MySQL 8
Description:
MySQL is the most popular Open Source Relational SQL Database Management System. MySQL is one of the best RDBMS being used for developing various web-based software applications.
Requirements:
Requires mysql installed.
Documentation:
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/
8. TTProxy
Description:
TTProxy Provide The Best Residential Proxies For You, There are more than 10 million high-quality proxy IP in the IP pool, and the pool is continuously updating and growing. Residential IP from around the world, 100% anonymous, zero IP blocking.
Requirements:
Requires buy a package or Get 100MB trial package.
Documentation:
Conclusion
As you can see, there are web scraping tool at your disposal and it will depend upon your web scraping needs as to what kind of tools will suit you.
However, a basic understanding of these PHP libraries can help you navigate through the maze of many libraries that exist and arrive at something useful.
