Scraping Data

[jason06]

Hey There!

Would it be possible to scrape data without an API and display scraped data on my website? There are so many websites that do the same thing; they fetch data without an API and display it. It seems like cURL scrapes data without an API, but I'm not familiar with it. Can anyone here assist me?

Thanks!

 

[Michalio]

You can use this function to get html:

function get_html(string $url): string {
    $ch = curl_init("http://www.example-webpage.com/file.html");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
    $content = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $content;
}

to get data from the retrieved html you can do it in 3 ways:
1. if it a valid html then you can use DomDocument: https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php
2. you can do it easily wyth preg_match
3. you can do it light with strpos/stripos and substr