panthervsroach
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
Roach is a complete web scraping toolkit for PHP. It is heavily inspired by the popular Scrapy package for Python.
Roach allows us to define spiders that crawl and scrape web documents. Roach isn’t just a simple crawler, but includes an entire pipeline to clean, persist and otherwise process extracted data as well.
Just like scrapy, Roach supports: - Middlewares - Item Pipelines - Extendibility through Plugins
It’s your all-in-one resource for web scraping in PHP.
Example Use
<?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!
<?php
use RoachPHP\Http\Response;
use RoachPHP\Spider\BasicSpider;
class RoachDocsSpider extends BasicSpider
{
/**
* @var string[]
*/
public array $startUrls = [
'https://roach-php.dev/docs/spiders'
];
public function parse(Response $response): \Generator
{
$title = $response->filter('h1')->text();
$subtitle = $response
->filter('main > div:nth-child(2) p:first-of-type')
->text();
yield $this->item([
'title' => $title,
'subtitle' => $subtitle,
]);
}
}