PHP Scraper: Bringing Simplicity back to Scraping and Crawling

# Navigation

While PHPScraper is mostly intended to parse websites and collect information, you can also use it to navigate websites. Below are examples of ways to surf around a website.

You can navigate to any URL. These URLs usually come from the parsed links.

$web = new \Spekulatius\PHPScraper\PHPScraper;

// We start on test page #1.
$web->go('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/navigation/1.html');

// Print the title to see if we actually at the right page...
echo $web->h1[0];   // 'Page #1'


// We navigate to the test page #2 using the absolute URL.
$web->clickLink('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/navigation/2.html');

// Print the title to see if we actually at the right page...
echo $web->h1[0];   // 'Page #2'

On a website you can click on links using their anchor texts:

$web = new \Spekulatius\PHPScraper\PHPScraper;

// We start on test page #1.
$web->go('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/navigation/1.html');

/**
 * This page contains:
 *
 * <a href="2.html">2 relative</a>
 */

// Print the title to see if we actually at the right page...
echo $web->h1[0];   // 'Page #1'


// We navigate to the test page #2 using the text it has on the page.
$web->clickLink('2 relative');

// Print the title to see if we actually at the right page...
echo $web->h1[0];   // 'Page #2'

This basic functionality should allow you to navigate websites.

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