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 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
Cons
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
Cons
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.
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.
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.
Simple and fast HTML and XML parser.
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.
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.
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 is a PHP library to easily scrape data from web pages.
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.
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.
Scrap web HTML using PHP. For example, you can use it to scrap data from IMDb and show it on your own website.
A PHP library to Scrape Websites from their sitemaps, extract relevant content from the webpage, and upload it to a database.
Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client that makes it easy to send HTTP requests and trivial to integrate with web services.
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.
The DomCrawler component eases DOM navigation for HTML and XML documents.
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.
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 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 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.
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