Implement crawler using PHP and Selenium WebDriver

With the booming development of the Internet, we can easily obtain massive amounts of data. Crawlers are one of the common ways to obtain data. Especially in the fields of data analysis and research that require large amounts of data, crawlers are increasingly used. This article will introduce how to implement a crawler using PHP and Selenium WebDriver.

1. What is Selenium WebDriver?

Selenium WebDriver is an automated testing tool, mainly used to simulate the behavior of human users in web applications, such as clicking, entering text and other operations. The purpose of the crawler is to simulate human behavior in web applications, so it is very reasonable to choose Selenium WebDriver as the crawler tool.

Advantages:

1. Implicit wait function can wait for a certain period of time before the page is loaded, thereby preventing the obtained HTML code from being incomplete.
2. Supports multiple browsers and operating systems, and using Webdriver can also simulate mobile browser behavior.
3. Update the status changes of the page in real time, not only to obtain the initial HTML code, but also to obtain the page status after executing JavaScript, thereby obtaining more comprehensive data.
4. Easy to master and operate, suitable for different developers.

2. Environment configuration

1. Installing Selenium WebDriver

Selenium WebDriver provides interfaces for various programming languages. This article uses PHP as an example. .

composer require facebook/webdriver

2. Install the Chrome browser

Selenium WebDriver supports multiple browsers. This article uses the Chrome browser as an example. You can go to the Chrome official website to download and install the Chrome browser.

3. Download ChromeDriver

To use the Chrome browser, you need to download the corresponding ChromeDriver driver.

Download address: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads

The version selection should correspond to the installed Chrome browser version, download and unzip it And add the directory where ChromeDriver is located to the environment variable PATH for easy calling.

3. Crawler Implementation

Below we will use an example to introduce in detail the specific steps to implement a crawler using PHP and Selenium WebDriver.

1. Open the browser

//引入 WebDriver
use FacebookWebDriverRemoteRemoteWebDriver;
use FacebookWebDriverWebDriverBy;

require_once('vendor/autoload.php');

//配置 ChromeOptions
$options = new FacebookWebDriverChromeChromeOptions();
//设置需要打开的 Chrome 浏览器的路径
$options->setBinary('/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome');
//设置启动 Chrome 的时候是否开启 GUI 窗口
$options->addArguments(['headless']);
//创建 Chrome WebDriver
$driver = RemoteWebDriver::create('http://localhost:9515', $options);

Note that if you need to set the proxy, set the window size at startup, etc., you can add parameters when creating the ChromeOptions object.

2. Open the page to be crawled

//打开网页
$driver->get('https://www.example.com');

3. Get the page content

//获取页面内容
$html = $driver->getPageSource();

4. Simulate user operations

//模拟用户登录
if ($driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::id('loginBtn'))->isDisplayed()) {
    $driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::id('loginBtn'))->click();
    $driver->waitForElementVisible(WebDriverBy::id('username'));
    $driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::id('username'))->sendKeys('your_username');
    $driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::id('password'))->sendKeys('your_password');
    $driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::id('submitBtn'))->click();
}

5. Get page information

//获取页面标题
$title = $driver->getTitle();

//获取页面 URL
$url = $driver->getCurrentURL();

//获取特定元素信息
$element = $driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::id('elementId'));
$element_text = $element->getText();

6. Close the browser

//关闭 Chrome WebDriver
$driver->close();
$driver->quit();

IV. Summary

Introduction to this article The specific steps of using PHP and Selenium WebDriver to implement crawlers are included, including environment configuration, crawler implementation, etc., which can help beginners understand and master the basic principles and operating steps of crawlers more easily. It should be noted that crawlers involve issues such as resource consumption of the website and impact on other users. Therefore, when using crawlers, you need to strictly abide by relevant policies, laws and regulations to avoid adverse effects on other people.

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