The Semalt Blog

PHP Web Scraping in 3 Ways or How to Parse Like a Pro

With the dawn of the Internet, all “business doings” are impossible without the World Wide Web. It’s of paramount importance to get actual data about market tendencies to make much headway in these. That’s why IT developers often do some research on sites to extract relevant information every now and then. Here is when web scraping with PHP comes into play. Parsing, harvesting, and screen scraping are about the same things ‒ exploring the content of a page and converting it to different forms. They stand for the techniques applied to get data from a website that is then saved to a local file or a database. PHP web scraping is used for several reasons. Analyzing a competitor’s site to see what strategies you can adopt in your products is one of them. The general concept of screen scraping can be explained with the help of an automated code, which: makes GET requests to a target site; receives an answer and parses an HTML or XML document; searches for data and converts it to a designated format (a video, prod