Web scraping in PHP: HTML parsers

HTML parsers

Options for parsing HTML in PHP, roughly from worst to best:

• Regular expressions — technically possible, but fragile and hard to maintain for real HTML.
• open_in_new phpQuery — jQuery-style API, but no longer actively maintained.
• PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser — jQuery-like selectors, also fairly old.
• open_in_new DiDOM — the most actively maintained of the three, and the recommended default choice.

Related: proxies , CAPTCHA solving .

PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

open_in_new Homepage .

Using

Selecting an element:

$page_content->find("#product_enabled", 0)->plaintext;