php-spidervswombat
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.
Wombat is a Ruby gem that makes it easy to scrape websites and extract structured data from HTML pages. It is built on top of Nokogiri, a popular Ruby gem for parsing and searching HTML and XML documents, and it provides a simple and intuitive API for defining and running web scraping operations.
One of the main features of Wombat is its ability to extract structured data from HTML pages using a simple, CSS-like syntax. It allows you to define a set of rules for extracting data from a page, and then automatically applies those rules to the page's HTML to extract the desired data. This makes it easy to extract data from even complex and dynamic pages, without having to write a lot of custom code.
In addition to its data extraction capabilities, Wombat also provides a variety of other features that can simplify the web scraping process. It can automatically follow links and scrape multiple pages, it can handle pagination and AJAX requests, and it can handle cookies and authentication. It also provides a built-in support for parallelism and queueing to speed up the scraping process.
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();
}
require 'wombat'
Wombat.crawl do
base_url "https://www.github.com"
path "/"
headline xpath: "//h1"
subheading css: "p.alt-lead"
what_is({ css: ".one-fourth h4" }, :list)
links do
explore xpath: '/html/body/header/div/div/nav[1]/a[4]' do |e|
e.gsub(/Explore/, "Love")
end
features css: '.nav-item-opensource'
business css: '.nav-item-business'
end
end
{
"headline"=>"How people build software",
"subheading"=>"Millions of developers use GitHub to build personal projects, support their businesses, and work together on open source technologies.",
"what_is"=>[
"For everything you build",
"A better way to work",
"Millions of projects",
"One platform, from start to finish"
],
"links"=>{
"explore"=>"Love",
"features"=>"Open source",
"business"=>"Business"
}
}