PHP Scraper: Bringing Simplicity back to Scraping and Crawling

# Scrape Images

You might wonder how to scrape photos, images and other graphics from a website using PHPScraper. As with other functionality, scraping the images & photos from a website follows a similar approach. All graphics such as images, photos, and infographics can be scraped and parsed along with details such as tag attributes or only as an URL list.

# Scrape Image URLs

The following example parses a web-page for images and returns absolute image URLs as an array.

$web = new \Spekulatius\PHPScraper\PHPScraper;

/**
 * Navigate to the test page. This page contains two images:
 *
 * <img src="https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/assets/cat.jpg" alt="absolute path">
 * <img src="/assets/cat.jpg" alt="relative path">
 */
$web->go('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/meta/lorem-ipsum.html');

/**
 * [
 *     'https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/assets/cat.jpg',
 *     'https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/assets/cat.jpg',
 * ]
 *
 * @note
 * The URL is listed twice because it's included twice on the page:
 * Once with a relative path and once with an absolute path.
 * The relative paths are resolved to absolute paths by default.
 */
var_dump($web->images);

TIP

If no images are found, the array remains empty. You can download images using $web->fetchAsset(...).

# Scrape Images with Details

If you are in need of more details the following requests allows you to access attributes of the image tag:

$web = new \Spekulatius\PHPScraper\PHPScraper;
$web->go('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/meta/lorem-ipsum.html');

/**
 * [
 *     'url' => 'https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/assets/cat.jpg',
 *     'alt' => 'absolute path',
 *     'width' => null,
 *     'height' => null,
 * ],
 * [
 *     'url' => 'https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/assets/cat.jpg',
 *     'alt' => 'relative path',
 *     'width' => null,
 *     'height' => null,
 * ]
 */
var_dump($web->imagesWithDetails);

SEO

The alt-text (with the keywords of the content) is used by search engines for image-based searches. Make sure to always define it.

# Scrape Attributes: Alt, Width and Height

The attributes for alt, width and height are included in the detailed data set.

If you require more data, you will either need to extend the library or submit an issue for consideration.

# Fetching Assets

If you want to fetch assets, you can do so using fetchAsset:

$web = new \Spekulatius\PHPScraper\PHPScraper;
$sharingImage = $web->fetchAsset($web->image);

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