crwlr-crawlervspanther
This library provides kind of a framework and a lot of ready to use, so-called steps, that you can use as building blocks, to build your own crawlers and scrapers with.
Some features: - Crawler Politeness innocent (respecting robots.txt, throttling,...) - Load URLs using - a (PSR-18) HTTP client (default is of course Guzzle) - or a headless browser (chrome) to get source after Javascript execution - Get absolute links from HTML documents link - Get sitemaps from robots.txt and get all URLs from those sitemaps - Crawl (load) all pages of a website spider - Use cookies (or don't) cookie - Use any HTTP methods (GET, POST,...) and send any headers or body - Iterate over paginated list pages repeat - Extract data from: - HTML and also XML (using CSS selectors or XPath queries) - JSON (using dot notation) - CSV (map columns) - Extract schema.org structured data in JSON-LD format from HTML documents - Keep memory usage low by using PHP Generators muscle - Cache HTTP responses during development, so you don't have to load pages again and again after every code change - Get logs about what your crawler is doing (accepts any PSR-3 LoggerInterface)
Panther is a convenient standalone library to scrape websites and to run end-to-end tests using real browsers.
Panther is super powerful. It leverages the W3C's WebDriver protocol to drive native web browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox.
Panther is very easy to use, because it implements Symfony's popular BrowserKit and DomCrawler APIs, and contains all the features you need to test your apps. It will sound familiar if you have ever created a functional test for a Symfony app: as the API is exactly the same! Keep in mind that Panther can be used in every PHP project, as it is a standalone library.
Panther automatically finds your local installation of Chrome or Firefox and launches them, so you don't need to install anything else on your computer, a Selenium server is not needed!
In test mode, Panther automatically starts your application using the PHP built-in web-server. You can focus on writing your tests or web-scraping scenario and Panther will take care of everything else.
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
Example Use
<?php
require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Crwlr\Crawler;
$crawler = new Crawler();
$crawler->get('https://example.com', ['User-Agent' => 'webscraping.fyi']);
// more links can be followed:
$crawler->followLinks();
// and current page can be parsed:
$response = $crawler->response();
$title = $crawler->filter('title')->text();
echo $response->getContent();
</div>
<div class="lib-example" markdown>
```php
<?php
use Symfony\Component\Panther\Client;
require __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php'; // Composer's autoloader
$client = Client::createChromeClient();
// Or, if you care about the open web and prefer to use Firefox
$client = Client::createFirefoxClient();
$client->request('GET', 'https://api-platform.com'); // Yes, this website is 100% written in JavaScript
$client->clickLink('Get started');
// Wait for an element to be present in the DOM (even if hidden)
$crawler = $client->waitFor('#installing-the-framework');
// Alternatively, wait for an element to be visible
$crawler = $client->waitForVisibility('#installing-the-framework');
echo $crawler->filter('#installing-the-framework')->text();
$client->takeScreenshot('screen.png'); // Yeah, screenshot!