In this post, we will learn web scraping with PHP.

Web scraping lets you collect data from web pages across the internet. It’s also called web crawling or web data extraction.

PHP is a widely used back-end scripting language for creating dynamic websites and web applications. And you can implement a web scraper using plain PHP code.

But since we do not want to reinvent the wheel, we can leverage some readily available open-source PHP web scraping libraries to help us collect our data.

In this tutorial, we will be discussing the various tools and services you can use with PHP to scrap a web page. The tools we will discuss are Guzzle, Goutte, Simple HTML DOM, and the headless browser Symfony Panther.

Note: before you scrape a website, you should carefully read their Terms of Service to make sure they are OK with being scraped. Scraping data – even if it’s publicly accessible – can potentially overload a website’s servers. (Who knows – if you ask politely, they may even give you an API key so you don’t have to scrape. 😉)

#php #web-development #programming #developer