


HTML Parsing and Screen Scraping With the Simple HTML DOM Library
Feb 28, 2025 am 10:50 AMThis tutorial demonstrates how to efficiently parse HTML using an open-source parser, avoiding the complexities of regular expressions. We'll scrape Envato Tuts as an example, extracting article titles and descriptions. This is for illustrative purposes; remember to always obtain permission before scraping a website.
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Setup
Begin by installing Composer, a PHP package manager, to simplify library installation.
Further steps are detailed below.
Documentation
Comprehensive documentation is available on the project's official GitHub repository.
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Practical Application: Scraping Envato Tuts
Let's create a script to extract article titles and descriptions from Envato Tuts . This is a demonstration and should not be performed without permission. Scraping can overload servers.
The core code snippet:
use voku\helper\HtmlDomParser; require_once 'vendor/autoload.php'; $articles = []; getArticles('https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials');
This includes the necessary library and initializes an array to store article data. The getArticles
function (defined later) fetches and processes the webpage.
-
Data Extraction
The heart of the script extracts article information:
$items = $html->find('article'); foreach($items as $post) { $articles[] = [ /* title */ $post->findOne(".posts__post-title")->firstChild()->text(), /* description */ $post->findOne("posts__post-teaser")->text() ]; }
This iterates through each article element (<article>
) and extracts the title and description using CSS selectors. Each $articles
entry will contain a title and description pair. For example:
$articles[0][0] = "My Article Name Here"; $articles[0][1] = "This is my article description";
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Handling Pagination
To handle multiple pages, we identify the "next" page link:
The relevant HTML:
<a aria-label="next" class="pagination__button pagination__next-button" href="http://miracleart.cn/link/a3cdf7cabc49ea4612b126ae2a30ecbf" rel="next"><i class="fa fa-angle-right"></i></a>
The script finds this link, extracts the href
attribute, and recursively calls getArticles()
for subsequent pages. Crucially, the $html
object is cleared to prevent memory exhaustion.
Conclusion
Parsing large websites can be time-consuming. This tutorial provides a foundation for HTML parsing using a user-friendly library. While this library is convenient, remember that other methods, such as PHP's built-in DOM manipulation with XPath, exist. Always prioritize obtaining permission before scraping any website.
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