Are you integrating with another web site but an API is not available? Does their API not provide what you need? Web scraping is a time-honored technique for collecting the information you need from a web page. In this book, you’ll learn the various tools and libraries available in PHP to retrieve, parse, and extract data from HTML.

The Web has come a long way in the last ten years. Web Scraping with PHP, 2nd Edition includes updates to the techniques of the first edition to account for modern PHP 7 based libraries written to more easily interact with web data.

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Whether you use plain PHP with cURL or a popular framework like Zend or Symfony, this book is full of examples showing how to use the classes and functions available. Topics covered include:

• HTTP requests and responses
• PHP’s HTTP Stream wrapper
• Using the cURL extension
• Working with the pecl_http extension
• Parsing responses with Guzzle
• Zend Framework’s HTTP classes
• An overview of Symfony’s libraries for web automation
• Writing a client from scratch
• Extensions for parsing and tidying XML and HTML
• Using regular expressions
• … and more.

About the Author

Matthew Turland has been working with PHP since 2002. He has authored a few books, spoken at multiple conferences, and contributed to numerous PHP projects. In his spare time, he likes to bend PHP to his will to scrape web pages and run IRC bots.