Scraping Links With PHP
By Justin Laing2008-01-06
XPath Makes Getting The Links You Want Easy
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Now for the real magic of the DOM: XPath! XPath allows you to gather collections of DOM nodes (otherwise known as tags in HTML). Say you want to only get links that are within unordered lists. All you have to do is write a query like “/html/body//ul//li//a” and pass it to XPath->evaluate(). I’m not going to go into all the ways you can use XPath because I’m just learning myself and someone else has already made a great list of examples: XPath Examples. Here’s a code snippet that will just get every link on the page using XPath:
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$hrefs = $xpath->evaluate("/html/body//a");Tutorial Pages:
» Scraping Links With PHP
» Get The Page Content
» Tip: Fake Your User Agent
» Using PHP’s DOM Functions To Parse The HTML
» XPath Makes Getting The Links You Want Easy
» Iterate And Store Your Links
» Your Completed Link Scraper
» What Else Could I Do With This Thing?
» Is Scraping Content Legal?
Originally posted on Makebeta
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