phpscrapervsscrapy
PHPScraper is a universal web-util for PHP. The main goal is to get stuff done instead of getting distracted with selectors, preparing & converting data structures, etc. Instead, you can just go to a website and get the relevant information for your project.
PHPScraper is a minimalistic scraper framework that is built on top of other popular scraping tools.
Features:
- Direct access to page basic features like: Meta data, Links, Images, Headings, Content, Keywords etc.
- File downloading.
- RSS, Sitemap and other feed processing.
- CSV, XML and JSON file processing.
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
Example Use
// create scraper object
$web = new \Spekulatius\PHPScraper\PHPScraper;
// go to URL
$web->go('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/content/selectors.html');
// elements can be found using XPath:
echo $web->filter("//*[@id='by-id']")->text(); // "Content by ID"
// or pre-defined variables covering basic page data:
$web->links; // for all links
$web->headings;
$web->images;
$web->contentKeywords;
$web->orderedLists;
$web->unorderedLists;
$web->paragraphs;
$web->outline; // basic page outline
$web->cleanOutlineWithParagraphs; // basic page outline