Example of scraping Instagram information using PHP

Instagram is one of the most popular social media today, with hundreds of millions of active users. Users upload billions of pictures and videos, and this data is very valuable to many businesses and individuals. Therefore, in many cases, it is necessary to use a program to automatically scrape Instagram data. This article will introduce how to use PHP to crawl Instagram data and provide implementation examples.

1. Install the cURL extension for PHP

cURL is a library and tool for transmitting data between various protocols. It can be used for sending and response. The cURL extension for PHP makes it easy to integrate cURL functionality into PHP code. Therefore, in order to scrape Instagram data, we need to install the cURL extension for PHP.

In Ubuntu/Debian, you can install the cURL extension using the following command:

sudo apt-get install php-curl

In CentOS/RHEL, you can install the cURL extension using the following command:

sudo yum install php-curl

2. Get Instagram’s Access Token

We need to use Instagram’s Access Token to access the Instagram API to capture data. To obtain an Access Token, you need to perform the following steps:

• Create an Instagram developer account
• Create a new application in the Instagram Developer website
• Get the access token Brand

Once you have an Access Token, you can use PHP code to access the Instagram API and scrape data.

3. Getting Data via Instagram API

Now, we will show how to get the following data using Instagram API:

• User Data
• Pictures recently posted by users

First, let’s see how to get Instagram user data. Here, we will get the user's basic information, such as ID, username, name, avatar, etc. The following is the implementation code:

$access_token = "ACCESS_TOKEN";
$user_id = "USER_ID";

// 获取用户信息
$url = "https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/$user_id/?access_token=$access_token";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$data = json_decode($output);
echo "Username: " . $data->data->username . "<br/>";
echo "Full Name: " . $data->data->full_name . "<br/>";
echo "Profile Picture: <img src="" . $data->data->profile_picture . ""/><br/>";

Now, let’s see how to get the pictures recently posted by the user. The following is the implementation code:

$access_token = "ACCESS_TOKEN";
$user_id = "USER_ID";

// 获取最近发布的图片
$url = "https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/$user_id/media/recent/?access_token=$access_token";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$data = json_decode($output);
foreach ($data->data as $item) {
    echo "<img src="" . $item->images->standard_resolution->url . ""/>";
}

4. Conclusion

In this article, we introduced how to use PHP to scrape Instagram data and provided an implementation example. If you are interested in scraping Instagram data, I hope this article can provide you with some help.

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