Web scraping is a way to extract useful information from a website. We mostly use this technique when there is no official API that allows us to retrieve the website’s data.
Several programming languages are packed with all the tools for scraping a website. But today, I’m here to give you a list of best PHP Web Scraping Libraries.
Some of these libraries will even work if the website content is loaded using JavaScript. Thanks to the headless browsers that simulate the web scraping just like a normal user views a web page.
A great thing about using PHP for web scraping is that you can automate the whole process with the help of CRON-job.
Goutte
Goutte might be the number one choice for people who wants to extract website data but with ease of use. You just need to install this library through the composer. After that, request any web page using its built-in web browser.
It helps you stay undetectable by websites that take additional security measures to prevent web scrapers. In simple words, it uses the Symfony BrowserKit component to depict like a real user is viewing a website. So, there is no reason for them to block us. Isn’t it?
Some of its real-life use cases include: clicking on a link, extract text from specific HTML element, and submit the form.
Pros
- Goutte comes with a headless web browser.
- Loved by a massive community of open source PHP developers.
- It can work with both HTML and XML documents.
- You can submit forms with Goutte.
- Very easy to navigate DOM because it makes use of Symfony’s DomCrawler Component.
Cons
- Requires PHP 7.1+ to work. It will not work in older versions of PHP.
Laravel Facade for Goutte
This one is a modified version of the original Goutte library. It is designed to work seamlessly with the popular PHP framework “Laravel”.
Most of the time PHP developers prefer using a framework instead of working with core PHP. There can be a number of reasons behind this decision. But, the most significant one is that a PHP framework like “Laravel” gives us a well structured and secure starting point.
So, I would highly recommend using this web scraping library in your existing or new Laravel based projects.
Pros
- It can quickly integrate within a Laravel website.
- You can use the composer to import its source code.
Cons
- It is not designed to be used by core PHP or frameworks other than Laravel.
Simple HTML DOM
A simple PHP HTML DOM parser written in PHP5+, supports invalid HTML, and provides a very easy way to find, extract and modify the HTML elements of the dom. The jquery-like syntax allows sophisticated finding methods for locating the elements you care about.
Panther
A browser testing and web scraping library for PHP and Symfony. Panther is a convenient standalone library to scrape websites and to run end-to-end tests using real browsers.
Features
- executes the JavaScript code contained in webpages
- supports everything that Chrome (or Firefox) implements
- allows taking screenshots
- can wait for asynchronously loaded elements to show up
- lets you run your own JS code or XPath queries in the context of the loaded page
- supports custom Selenium server installations
- supports remote browser testing services including SauceLabs and BrowserStack
Httpful
A Chainable, REST Friendly, PHP HTTP Client. A sane alternative to cURL.
Httpful is a simple HTTP Client library for PHP 7.2+. There is an emphasis on readability, simplicity, and flexibility – basically provides the features and flexibility to get the job done and make those features really easy to use.
Features
- Readable HTTP Method Support (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, HEAD, PATCH, and OPTIONS)
- Custom Headers
- Automatic “Smart” Parsing
- Automatic Payload Serialization
- Basic Auth
- Client Side Certificate Auth
- Request “Templates”
DiDOM
Simple and fast HTML and XML parser.
hQuery.php
An extremely fast web scraper that parses megabytes of invalid HTML in a blink of an eye. PHP5.3+, no dependencies.
You can use the familiar jQuery/CSS selector syntax to easily find the data you need.
In my unit tests, I demand it be at least 10 times faster than Symfony’s DOMCrawler on a 3Mb HTML document. In reality, according to my humble tests, it is two-three orders of magnitude faster than DOMCrawler in some cases, especially when selecting thousands of elements, and on average uses x2 less RAM.
Features
- Very fast parsing and lookup
- Parses broken HTML
- jQuery-like style of DOM traversal
- Low memory usage
- Can handle big HTML documents (I have tested up to 20Mb, but the limit is the amount of RAM you have)
- Doesn’t require cURL to be installed and automatically handles redirects (see hQuery::fromUrl())
- Caches response for multiple processing tasks
- PSR-7 friendly (see hQuery::fromHTML($message))
- PHP 5.3+
- No dependencies
Ultimate Web Scraper Toolkit
A PHP library of tools designed to handle all of your web scraping needs under an MIT or LGPL license. This toolkit easily makes RFC-compliant web requests that are indistinguishable from a real web browser, has a web browser-like state engine for handling cookies and redirects, and a full cURL emulation layer for web hosts without the PHP cURL extension installed. The powerful tag filtering library TagFilter is included to easily extract the desired content from each retrieved document or used to process HTML documents that are offline.
This toolkit also comes with classes for creating custom web servers and WebSocket servers. That custom API you want the average person to install on their home computer or deploy to devices in the enterprise just became easier to deploy.
Features
- Carefully follows the IETF RFC Standards surrounding the HTTP protocol.
- Supports file transfers, SSL/TLS, and HTTP/HTTPS/CONNECT proxies.
- Easy to emulate various web browser headers.
- A web browser-like state engine that emulates redirection (e.g. 301) and automatic cookie handling for managing multiple requests.
- HTML form extraction and manipulation support. No need to fake forms!
- Extensive callback support.
- Asynchronous/Non-blocking socket support. For when you need to scrape lots of content simultaneously.
- WebSocket support.
- A full cURL emulation layer for drop-in use on web hosts that are missing cURL.
- An impressive CSS3 selector tokenizer (TagFilter::ParseSelector()) that carefully follows the W3C Specification and passes the official W3C CSS3 static test suite.
- Includes a fast and powerful tag filtering library (TagFilter) for correctly parsing really difficult HTML content (e.g. Microsoft Word HTML) and can easily extract desired content from HTML and XHTML using CSS3 compatible selectors.
- TagFilter::HTMLPurify() produces XSS defense results on par with HTML Purifier.
- Includes the legacy Simple HTML DOM library to parse and extract desired content from HTML. NOTE: Simple HTML DOM is only included for legacy reasons. TagFilter is much faster and more accurate as well as more powerful and flexible.
- DNS over HTTPS support.
- International domain name (IDNA/Punycode) support.
- An unnecessarily feature-laden web server class with optional SSL/TLS support. Run a web server written in pure PHP. Why? Because you can, that’s why.
- A decent WebSocket server class is included too. For a scalable version of the WebSocket server class, see Data Relay Center.
- Can be used to download entire websites for offline use.
- Has a liberal open source license. MIT or LGPL, your choice.
- Designed for relatively painless integration into your project.
- Sits on GitHub for all of that pull request and issue tracker goodness to easily submit changes and ideas respectively.
PHP IMDb.com Grabber
This PHP library enables you to scrape data from IMDB.com.
This script is a proof of concept. It’s working, but you shouldn’t use it. IMDb doesn’t allow this method of data fetching. I do not use or promote this script. You’re responsible for using it.
The technique used is called “web scraping”. This means, that if IMDb changes any of its HTML, the script is going to fail. The developer won’t update this on a regular basis, so don’t count on it to be working all the time.
Scrapher
Scrapher is a PHP library to easily scrape data from web pages.
PHP Web Scraping Class
A web scraper PHP class using PHP cURL to scrap web pages. By which you can scrap web page by cURL get, post methods also by which you can scrap web page content from an asp.net based websites with form post.
Client URL Library (cURL)
PHP supports libcurl, a library created by Daniel Stenberg, that allows you to connect and communicate to many different types of servers with many different types of protocols. libcurl currently supports the HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, gopher, telnet, dict, file, and LDAP protocols. libcurl also supports HTTPS certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading (this can also be done with PHP’s FTP extension), HTTP form-based upload, proxies, cookies, and user+password authentication.
PHP Web Scraper
Scrap web HTML using PHP. For example, you can use it to scrap data from IMDb and show it on your own website.
Site Scrapper
A PHP library to Scrape Websites from their sitemaps, extract relevant content from the webpage, and upload it to a database.
Features
- Sitemap parsing (either a single site or a list of sites)
- Scrapping (relevant content extraction)
- Keyword extraction
- Word count of extracted data
- Custom User-Agent string
- Database uploading of extracted content
Guzzle, PHP HTTP client
Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client that makes it easy to send HTTP requests and trivial to integrate with web services.
Features
- Simple interface for building query strings, POST requests, streaming large uploads, streaming large downloads, using HTTP cookies, uploading JSON data, etc…
- Can send both synchronous and asynchronous requests using the same interface.
- Uses PSR-7 interfaces for requests, responses, and streams. This allows you to utilize other PSR-7 compatible libraries with Guzzle.
- Supports PSR-18 allowing interoperability between other PSR-18 HTTP Clients.
- Abstracts away the underlying HTTP transport, allowing you to write environment and transport agnostic code; i.e., no hard dependency on cURL, PHP streams, sockets, or non-blocking event loops.
- A Middleware system allows you to augment and compose client behavior.
Requests for PHP
Requests is an HTTP library written in PHP, for human beings. It simplifies how you interact with other sites and takes away all your worries.
It is roughly based on the API from the excellent Requests Python library. Requests is ISC Licensed (similar to the new BSD license) and has no dependencies, except for PHP 5.6.20+.
Despite PHP’s use as a language for the web, its tools for sending HTTP requests are severely lacking. cURL has an interesting API, to say the least, and you can’t always rely on it being available. Sockets provide only low-level access and require you to build most of the HTTP response parsing yourself.
Features
- International Domains and URLs
- Browser-style SSL Verification
- Basic/Digest Authentication
- Automatic Decompression
- Connection Timeouts
DomCrawler Component
The DomCrawler component eases DOM navigation for HTML and XML documents.
Buzz – Scripted HTTP browser
Buzz is a lightweight (<1000 lines of code) PHP 7.1 library for issuing HTTP requests. The library includes three clients: FileGetContents, Curl and MultiCurl. The MultiCurl supports batch requests and HTTP2 server push.
Web scraping in PHP
Have you ever wanted to get specific data from another website but there’s no API available for it? That’s where Web Scraping comes in, if the data is not made available by the website we can just scrape it from the website itself.
htmlSQL
htmlSQL is an experimental PHP library that allows you to access HTML values with SQL-like syntax. This means that you don’t have to write complex functions or regular expressions to extract specific values.
QueryPath
QueryPath is a PHP library for manipulating XML and HTML. It is designed to work not only with local files but also with web services and database resources.
QueryPath is a jQuery-like library for working with XML and HTML documents in PHP. It now contains support for HTML5 via the HTML5-PHP project.