TOP 8 PHP WEB SCRAPING LIBRARIES

These are the best libraries for web scraping using PHP. You can use these libraries for extracting large volumes of data from various sources, and those data can be used for many purposes and applications.  

Online scraping is a computerized technique for gathering enormous volumes of information from sites. Most of this data is unstructured in HTML format and is transformed into structured data in a database or spreadsheet for use in multiple applications. Web scraping can be done through various methods to collect data from websites. Using their APIs, you may access the structured data on many huge websites, including Google, Twitter, Facebook, Stack Overflow, and others. Other options include leveraging specific APIs, online services, or even writing your code from scratch for web scraping.   

To transform this web scraping process into an easier one, we have carefully handpicked a set of libraries in the language - PHP. 

panther- 

• A practical standalone framework for web page scraping and running end-to-end tests with actual browsers. 
• Enables taking a screenshot. 
• Can wait for components that are loaded asynchronously to appear. 
• Supports custom Selenium server installations. 
• Supports remote browser testing services, including SauceLabs and BrowserStack. 

core- 

• Inspired by Scrapy package for python. 
• A comprehensive PHP web scraping toolbox. 
• It includes a pipeline to clean, persist, and process extracted data. 

Goutte- 

• A web crawling and screen scraping library for PHP. 
• It has an impressive API to crawl websites. 
• It can extract data from HTML/XML responses.

PHPScraper- 

• All scraping functionalities can be accessed as a function or property call. 
• Uses League/URI to process URLs. 
• Uses donatello-za/rake-php-plus to extract and analyze keywords.

laravel- 

• Laravel adapter for Roach. 
• A package can be installed via composer. 
• Registers a few Artisan commands for easier development. 

Grawler- 

• Automates the task of using google dorks, scrapes the outputs, and stores them in a file. 
• Supports both automatic and manual modes. 
• API keys for proxies are first validated and added to the file. 

crawler- 

• Can assist in building our own scrapers. 
• Can load URLs and get absolute links from HTML documents. 
• Can keep memory usage low by using PHP generators. 

ultimate-web-scraper- 

• Makes RFC-compliant web requests that are indistinguishable from a real web browser. 
• Has a web browser-like state engine for handling cookies and redirects. 
• Tag filtering library TagFilter is included to extract the desired content from each retrieved document easily. 
• Easy to emulate various web browser headers.