Goutte is a screen scraping and web crawling library for PHP.
Goutte provides a nice API to crawl websites and extract data from the HTML/XML responses.
Goutte works with PHP 5.3.3 or later.
Installing Goutte is as easy as it can get. Download the Goutte.phar
file and you're done!
Require the Goutte phar file to use Goutte in a script:
require_once '/path/to/goutte.phar';
Create a Goutte Client instance (which extends
Symfony\Component\BrowserKit\Client):
use Goutte\Client;
$client = new Client();
Make requests with the request() method:
$crawler = $client->request('GET', 'http://www.symfony-project.org/');
The method returns a Crawler object
(Symfony\Component\DomCrawler\Crawler).
Click on links:
$link = $crawler->selectLink('Plugins')->link();
$crawler = $client->click($link);
Submit forms:
$form = $crawler->selectButton('sign in')->form();
$crawler = $client->submit($form, array('signin[username]' => 'fabien', 'signin[password]' => 'xxxxxx'));
Extract data:
$nodes = $crawler->filter('.error_list');
if ($nodes->count())
{
die(sprintf("Authentification error: %s\n", $nodes->text()));
}
printf("Nb tasks: %d\n", $crawler->filter('#nb_tasks')->text());
Read the documentation of the BrowserKit and DomCrawler Symfony Components for more information about what you can do with Goutte.
Goutte is a thin wrapper around the following fine PHP libraries:
-
Symfony Components: BrowserKit, ClassLoader, CssSelector, DomCrawler, Finder, and Process
Goutte is licensed under the MIT license.