

There a number of PHP web scraping framework options. It’s still a useful technique to know for sure, but it’s getting less-useful than it was a decade ago. There are tons of good reasons for that, including the increasing commonness of CAPTCHAs and other bot-stopping maneuvers. The other big reason not to do PHP web scraping is simply that you’re not wanting to do web scraping at all. Web scraping with PHP is not better enough that I’d use it in preference to some language like Java that I was already writing my project in. So the primary reason I wouldn’t do PHP scraping? That I knew a different language better, or was already using it. And good enough that I’d do it without a second’s hesitation in a PHP project. The PHP scraping libraries are quite good, but they’re not amazing. Scraping with PHP is not so easy that I’d plan to use it in the middle of Python web project, for example. Use PHP for your web scraping if the rest of your application (that’s going to use the result of this web scraping) is written in PHP. The primary reason for doing PHP web scraping is that you know and love PHP. No PHP web scraping framework I know is mind-blowingly good. I doubt the absolutely best web scraping framework is writting in PHP.


And while I’ve not done an exhaustive search, I do suspect there are better languages than PHP to use for scraping. There are a number of PHP web scraping libraries. But without citation 🙃) The Reasons Not to Do Web Scraping This is why Intuit (makers of Mint, QuickBooks, etc) are spending millions on its bank web-scrappers every year. Like a designer changing the HTML that surrounds the data you’re seeking. Because they’re getting at underlying data presented in a web page’s internal HTML, they can break for random reasons. I said “we want that data” twice because a characteristic of web scrapper scripts is that they’re fragile.

That said, sometimes “web scraping” is your only choice.
#WEBSCRAPER CHROME FILL OUT FORMS CODE#
And it’ll make your code more brittle than it should be, and is general going to make an application more complex to build. First and foremost, scraping the web (in PHP) is bad, mkay? PHP web scraping isn’t worse than doing it with other languages, it’s just that web scraping in general is most likely to be looked by with disdain by content-producers.
