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php-spidervsscrapy

MIT 6 1 1,328
61 (month) Mar 16 2013 v0.7.2(9 months ago)
52,313 30 669 BSD-3-Clause
Jul 26 2019 1.5 million (month) 2.11.2(3 months ago)

php-spider is a PHP library for web crawling and scraping. It allows developers to easily navigate and extract data from websites by simulating a web browser's behavior.

  • supports two traversal algorithms: breadth-first and depth-first
  • supports crawl depth limiting, queue size limiting and max downloads limiting
  • supports adding custom URI discovery logic, based on XPath, CSS selectors, or plain old PHP
  • comes with a useful set of URI filters, such as Domain limiting
  • supports custom URI filters, both prefetch (URI) and postfetch (Resource content)
  • supports custom request handling logic
  • supports Basic, Digest and NTLM HTTP authentication. See example.
  • comes with a useful set of persistence handlers (memory, file)
  • supports custom persistence handlers
  • collects statistics about the crawl for reporting
  • dispatches useful events, allowing developers to add even more custom behavior
  • supports a politeness policy

This Spider does not support Javascript.

Scrapy is an open-source Python library for web scraping. It allows developers to extract structured data from websites using a simple and consistent interface.

Scrapy provides:

  • A built-in way to follow links and extract data from multiple pages (crawling)
  • Handling common web scraping tasks such as logging in, handling cookies, and handling redirects.

Scrapy is built on top of the Twisted networking engine, which provides a non-blocking way to handle multiple requests at the same time, allowing Scrapy to efficiently scrape large websites.

It also comes with a built-in mechanism for handling common web scraping problems, such as:

  • handling HTTP errors
  • handling broken links

Scrapy also provide these features:

  • Support for storing scraped data in various formats, such as CSV, JSON, and XML.
  • Built-in support for selecting and extracting data using XPath or CSS selectors (through parsel).
  • Built-in support for handling common web scraping problems (like deduplication and url filtering).
  • Ability to easily extend its functionality using middlewares.
  • Ability to easily extend output processing using pipelines.

Highlights


popularcss-selectorsxpath-selectorscommunity-toolsoutput-pipelinesmiddlewaresasyncproductionlarge-scale

Example Use


use Example\StatsHandler;
use VDB\Spider\Discoverer\XPathExpressionDiscoverer;
use Symfony\Contracts\EventDispatcher\Event;
use VDB\Spider\Event\SpiderEvents;
use VDB\Spider\Spider;

require_once('example_complex_bootstrap.php');

// Create Spider
$spider = new Spider('http://dmoztools.net');

// Add a URI discoverer. Without it, the spider does nothing. In this case, we want <a> tags from a certain <div>
$spider->getDiscovererSet()->set(new XPathExpressionDiscoverer("//div[@id='catalogs']//a"));

// Set some sane options for this example. In this case, we only get the first 10 items from the start page.
$spider->getDiscovererSet()->maxDepth = 1;
$spider->getQueueManager()->maxQueueSize = 10;

// Let's add something to enable us to stop the script
$spider->getDispatcher()->addListener(
    SpiderEvents::SPIDER_CRAWL_USER_STOPPED,
    function (Event $event) {
        echo "\nCrawl aborted by user.\n";
        exit();
    }
);

// Add a listener to collect stats to the Spider and the QueueMananger.
// There are more components that dispatch events you can use.
$statsHandler = new StatsHandler();
$spider->getQueueManager()->getDispatcher()->addSubscriber($statsHandler);
$spider->getDispatcher()->addSubscriber($statsHandler);

// Execute crawl
$spider->crawl();

// Build a report
echo "\n  ENQUEUED:  " . count($statsHandler->getQueued());
echo "\n  SKIPPED:   " . count($statsHandler->getFiltered());
echo "\n  FAILED:    " . count($statsHandler->getFailed());
echo "\n  PERSISTED:    " . count($statsHandler->getPersisted());

// Finally we could do some processing on the downloaded resources
// In this example, we will echo the title of all resources
echo "\n\nDOWNLOADED RESOURCES: ";
foreach ($spider->getDownloader()->getPersistenceHandler() as $resource) {
    echo "\n - " . $resource->getCrawler()->filterXpath('//title')->text();
}

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