PHP and Selenium work together to implement artifact-level automated crawlers

With the rapid development of Internet technology, web crawlers emerged as the times require and have become an important means of data capture. However, with the continuous updating of website technology, traditional crawlers can no longer meet our needs. At this time, the combination of PHP and Selenium solves this problem.

1. What is PHP and Selenium

PHP is an open source server-side scripting language that is commonly used for web development and data processing. Its ease of use and efficiency are highly praised by developers. love. Selenium is a popular automated testing tool, mainly used for automated testing of web applications. Selenium can be used to simulate various user operations, such as page clicks, input, etc., and can quickly automate testing of web applications. The combination of the two allows for an extremely detailed and efficient web crawler.

2. Advantages of the combination of PHP and Selenium

1. Efficiency

The combination of PHP and Selenium can make data capture faster and more efficient. On the one hand, PHP has a fast parsing speed and can quickly process data; on the other hand, Selenium can simulate user operations to crawl dynamic pages such as JavaScript, effectively improving the speed of the crawler.

2. Ease of use

Compared with other development languages, PHP has better ease of use, and the threshold for learning and use is relatively low. In addition, Selenium also has a relatively friendly interface, and even developers without much technical foundation can easily get started.

3. Scalability

The combination of PHP and Selenium has strong scalability and can quickly adapt to different websites and process complex data formats, further improving the adaptability of crawlers. and flexibility.

3. Application examples of PHP and Selenium

Next, we will use an example to demonstrate how to use PHP and Selenium to implement an automated crawler. This example will take "Douban Movies" as an example to demonstrate the specific implementation method.

1. Install related software

We first need to install related software, such as PHP, Chrome browser and ChromeDriver. ChromeDriver is an important part of Selenium and can be used in conjunction with Chrome browser for automated operations. We can download and install it on the official website.

2. Write code

We write a PHP script and import the Selenium client library to realize automated crawling of Douban movies. According to the characteristics of Douban movies, we first need to search for the movie to obtain its detailed information.

54e3d8af7c82483ac0f4ff3e6e22c2f4 '/usr/bin/google-chrome', 'args' => array('--headless', '--no-sandbox ', '--disable-dev-shm-usage'));
$driver = RemoteWebDriver::create('http://localhost:9515', $chrome_options);
// Send search to Douban Request
$driver->get('https://www.douban.com/');
$search_input = $driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::name('q'));
$search_input->sendKeys('Stephen Chow');
$search_input->submit();

// Enter the search results page, click on the movie details to enter the details page
$movie_list = $driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::className('sc-movie-list'));
$first_movie = $movie_list->findElement(WebDriverBy::cssSelector('li:nth-child(1) '));
$first_movie->click();

// Get movie information
$movie_name = $driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::className('title')) ->getText();
$directors = $driver->findElements(WebDriverBy::cssSelector('.director .attrs a'));
$director_names = array();
foreach ( $directors as $director) {

array_push($director_names, $director->getText());

}
echo $movie_name . PHP_EOL;
echo 'Director:' . implode('/', $director_names) . PHP_EOL;
$driver ->quit();
?>

The above code can realize automated crawling of the Douban movie "Stephen Chow". We use $driver to create an instance of ChromeDriver and use it to automate operations and extract information.

4. Summary

The combination of PHP and Selenium is efficient, easy to use and scalable, and has become a relatively artifact-level automated website crawler tool. In practical applications, we can write different codes according to different needs to implement corresponding data crawling. Of course, in order to avoid excessive pressure on the website server, we also need to pay attention to certain crawling guidelines, such as not crawling frequently, not collecting data excessively, etc.

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