Question 1

How to handle JavaScript sites with PHP-Spider?

Accepted Answer

PHP-Spider cannot execute JavaScript, so for dynamic sites, you must pre-render pages using external tools like headless browsers or rely on server-side rendered content. The library focuses on static HTML parsing, as stated in the README.

Question 2

PHP-Spider vs Goutte: which is better?

Accepted Answer

PHP-Spider offers more granular control over crawling algorithms and event-driven architecture, ideal for custom scrapers, while Goutte is simpler for basic DOM interaction. Choose PHP-Spider for complex traversal and filtering needs, but Goutte for quick form scraping.

Question 3

How to scrape data from a website using PHP-Spider?

Accepted Answer

Start by configuring a spider with a seed URL, add discoverers like XPathExpressionDiscoverer to extract links, set limits such as max depth, and use persistence handlers to store results, as outlined in the simple usage example with code snippets.

Question 4

Can PHP-Spider handle login pages or forms?

Accepted Answer

It supports Basic, Digest, and NTLM HTTP authentication via examples, but form submission isn't a built-in feature; you'd need custom request logic or handlers to manage sessions, making it less straightforward for interactive sites.

Question 5

How to set up caching in PHP-Spider to avoid re-downloading?

Accepted Answer

Use the CachedResourceFilter with a spider ID and cache path, setting max age in seconds to skip recently downloaded resources, as detailed in the caching example and documentation for incremental crawls.

Question 6

What are the performance limits of PHP-Spider?

Accepted Answer

Performance is configurable via queue size, download limits, and politeness delays, but it may not scale to massive distributed crawling out-of-the-box due to its PHP-based, single-threaded nature, requiring custom optimizations for high-volume tasks.

PHP Spider

What is PHP Spider?

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