php dynamic web crawling

Question

I'm trying the chrome-php/chrome library to read dynamically rendered web pages, but it's not returning anything. I'm using php version 8.0.

This is what I have implemented [I have followed the documentation] -

use HeadlessChromium\BrowserFactory;

$browserFactory = new BrowserFactory();

// starts headless chrome
$browser = $browserFactory->createBrowser('/opt/google/chrome/chrome');

try {
    // creates a new page and navigate to an URL
    $page = $browser->createPage();
    $page->navigate('http://example.com')->waitForNavigation();

    // get page title
    $pageTitle = $page->evaluate('document.title')->getReturnValue();

    echo $pageTitle;

} finally {
    //bye
    $browser->close();
}

It's not returning the title of the URL I'm trying to read. Can you help me debug this issue?

Answer 1

Before making modifications, put this in your script so that it displays the error:

ini_set('display_errors', 1);
ini_set('display_startup_errors', 1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);

The error may lie in this line: This method does not accept strings.

$browser = $browserFactory->createBrowser('/opt/google/chrome/chrome');

You must pass the google chrome executable to:

$browserFactory = new BrowserFactory('/opt/google/chrome/chrome');

Or leave it blank and the system will use the default location:

$browserFactory = new BrowserFactory();