Use PHP to implement a crawler that captures Sina Weibo user information

In recent years, with the rapid development of mobile Internet, social networks have become an indispensable part of people's daily lives. Among them, Weibo, as one of the well-known social media in China, has extensive influence among user groups. However, since Sina Weibo restricts users from independently applying for developer permissions, the difficulty of collecting information has increased to a certain extent. Therefore, in order to solve this problem, this article will introduce a crawler method that uses PHP to crawl Sina Weibo user information.

1. Overview of the crawler process

The crawler process introduced in this article is as follows:

1. Obtain user ID

Due to the access restrictions of Sina Weibo , we do not have direct access to the user's data. Therefore, when implementing a crawler to capture Sina Weibo user information, we need to obtain the user ID first. By analyzing the HTML code of the Weibo homepage, we can find that each user's ID exists in the URL of the personal homepage, and its form is: http://weibo.com/userID. We can access the link, extract the user ID, and use it for subsequent data scraping.

2. Simulated login

Due to Sina Weibo’s access restrictions, we need to log in before performing data capture. We can simulate login operations through the PHP CURL library. In the PHP CURL library, we can use the following functions to implement simulated login:

curl_init(): Initialize a CURL session
curl_setopt(): Set CURL session options
curl_exec(): Execute a CURL session
curl_close(): Close the CURL session

3. Capture user information

After using the PHP CURL library to simulate login, we can directly access the user's personal homepage, and then parse the HTML code , extract the user information. It should be noted that since the web version of Sina Weibo implements partial update of data through Ajax, it is necessary to use PHP to request data from its server, and then analyze the JSON data returned by the server to extract the required information.

4. Data storage

We can store the captured user information in the MySQL database to facilitate subsequent data processing and analysis. It should be noted that since Sina Weibo has strict restrictions on capturing data, in order to avoid triggering the anti-crawler mechanism, we need to add a certain time interval when capturing data, and we need to regularly change the account password for simulated login.

2. Specific implementation method

1. Obtain user ID

We can write a function to obtain the corresponding user ID by accessing the URL of the user's homepage. The specific code is as follows:

function getWeiboID($url){
$pattern = '/(d )/s';
preg_match($pattern, $url, $matches);
$res = $matches[1];
return $res;
}

2. Simulate login

We can write a function to simulate the user login process. The specific code is as follows:

function login($username,$password){
$url = "http://login.weibo.cn/login/";
$curl = curl_init() ;
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "username=$username&password=$password");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, '');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, ' cookie.txt');
$content = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
}

3. Capture user information

us You can write a function to capture the user's basic information, such as nickname, gender, region, birthday, etc. The specific code is as follows:

function getUserInfo($weiboID,$cookiefile){
$url = "http://m.weibo.cn/users/$weiboID";
$curl = curl_init ();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookiefile);
$json = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);

$info = json_decode($json,true)["userInfo"];
$nickname = $info["screen_name"] ;
$gender = $info["gender"];
$province = $info["province"];
$city = $info["city"];
$birthday = $ info["birthday"];
return array(

"nickname" => $nickname,
"gender" => $gender,
"province" => $province,
"city" => $city,
"birthday" => $birthday

);
}

4. Data storage

Finally, we can capture User information is stored in the MySQL database. The specific code is as follows:

function saveUserInfo($userInfo){
$db = mysqli_connect("localhost","root","password","database");
$nickname = mysqli_real_escape_string( $db,$userInfo["nickname"]);
$gender = mysqli_real_escape_string($db,$userInfo["gender"]);
$province = mysqli_real_escape_string($db,$userInfo["province"] );
$city = mysqli_real_escape_string($db,$userInfo["city"]);
$birthday = mysqli_real_escape_string($db,$userInfo["birthday"]);
$sql = "INSERT INTO users(nickname,gender,province,city,birthday) VALUES ('$nickname','$gender','$province','$city','$birthday')";
mysqli_query($db, $sql);
mysqli_close($db);
}

3. Summary

Through the introduction of this article, we can learn how to implement a crawler method to capture Sina Weibo user information through PHP. It should be noted that in the process of implementing the crawler, we need to comply with network regulations, avoid violating laws and regulations, and pay attention to privacy protection. In addition, in order to ensure the crawling effect, we need to continuously optimize the algorithm to avoid triggering the anti-crawler mechanism.

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