README

Easy to use page scraper with just few lines of code. Scrap data from any website using XPath or CSS Selector.

Introduction:

The easiest way to parse data from a valid xml/html page is to use XPath queries. But the method of fetching the remote data can vary e.g. using simple file_get_contents function which uses PHP Streams to fetch the remote page, CURL can be used, the famous Guzzle library can be used. To decouple the final product i.e. Page from the remote page fetching logic and to avoid leaving the Page object in an unstable state I have used the Builder pattern. The Page object is passed to the Builder object which contains the logic for fetching the remote page, then the builder is passed to the director object which tells the builder how to configure the Page object. In a nutshell:

$page = new Page('https://news.ycombinator.com');
$builder = new PageBuilder($page);
$builder->setDataConfig(array(
    'side_links' => array('css' => '.title .comhead'), // use CSS Selector
    'titles'     => '//td[@class="title"]//a/text()', // use XPath
    'links'      => '//td[@class="title"]//a/@href', // use XPath
));
$director = new PageBuilderDirector($builder);
$director->buildPage();
$data = $page->getData();

Using Client Class To Make Things Easier:

To avoid the boilerplate work you can use Client class to make life easy:

$client = new Client(array(
    'url'         => 'https://news.ycombinator.com',
    'data_config' => array(
        'titles' => '//td[@class="title"]//a/text()', // the xpath query
        'links' => '//td[@class="title"]//a/@href', // the xpath query
    ),
));

$page = $client->fetchPage();
$data = $page->getData();

/*
  prints:
   array (
    'titles' => array(
        'title one from the remote page',
        'title two from the remote page',
        'title three from the remote page',
        // so on...
    ),
    'links' => array(
        'http://www.example.com/one',
        'http://www.example.com/two',
        'http://www.example.com/three',
        // so on...
    ),
  )
*/
print_r($data);

Having said that, you can also set your own builders and directors using the client's setter methods. Please see the class defination for the docs.

Advanced Parsing Data:

the data_config can contain key => value pairs. Where the value can be a valid xpath query or a callback which recieves the configured Page object which you can utilize for advanced parsing and the key holds the parsed result. E.g:

$client = new Client(array(
    'url'         => 'https://news.ycombinator.com',
    'data_config' => array(
        'side_links' => '.title .comhead', // use css selector
        'titles' => '//td[@class="title"]//a/text()', // use xpath query
        'links' => function ($page) {
            $links = array();
            $node_list = $page->getXpath()->query('//td[@class="title"]//a/@href');
            foreach($node_list as $node) {
                $links[] = $node->nodeValue;
            }
            return $links;
        },
    ),
));

$page = $client->fetchPage();
$data = $page->getData();

Installation:

use composer to install the library, in your composer.json:

{
    "require": {
        "mahadazad/page-scraper": "dev-master"
    }
}

or run

php composer.phar require "mahadazad/page-scraper":"dev-master"