SoFunction
Updated on 2025-03-04

Exploration of technology to build efficient network crawler implementation for PHP and Selenium

Install PHP and Selenium

Selenium is a web automation testing tool that simulates users' actions on web pages. Selenium can interact with multiple languages, including PHP.

Integrate Selenium in PHP

Install PHPSeleniumlibrary. Can be passedComposerTo install it:

composer require facebook/webdriver

Define your web driver

The Chrome browser is used here, and of course Selenium supports multiple browsers. The following code can be saved as a separate file:

use FacebookWebDriverRemoteDesiredCapabilities;
use FacebookWebDriverRemoteRemoteWebDriver;
require_once('vendor/');
$host = 'http://localhost:4444/wd/hub';
$capabilities = DesiredCapabilities::chrome();
$capabilities->setCapability('goog:chromeOptions', ['args' => ['--headless']]);
$driver = RemoteWebDriver::create($host, $capabilities);

  • Introduce necessary classes and files

  • Defines the driver's address and chrome browser options

  • passRemoteWebDriverClass creates a connection to the driver

Simulate user operations

For example, visit a website:

$driver->get('');

This will open Baidu News and get all news links:

$news_links = $driver->findElements(WebDriverBy::cssSelector('.c-title a'));
$links = [];
foreach ($news_links as $news_link) {
    $links[] = $news_link->getAttribute('href');
}
  • useWebDriverBy::cssSelectorGet all news links through CSS selector
  • Iterate through each link and get the URL of each link

Now that you have all the news links, you can iterate through them to crawl the content of each link in turn:

foreach ($links as $link) {
    $driver->get($link);
    $news_title = $driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::cssSelector('.article-title'))->getText();
    $news_content = $driver->findElement(WebDriverBy::cssSelector('.article-content'))->getText();
    // Save news titles and content to the database}

  • passWebDriverBy::cssSelectorPosition the specified element and get the element text content

  • Store news titles and content in a database

The above is the basis for building efficient web crawlers with PHP and Selenium. Of course, if further optimization is needed, you can combine multiple tools and technologies to use, such as using multi-threading to improve efficiency, and using font anti-obfuscation to solve the problem of some websites deconfusing fonts. etc. The world of crawlers is full of strange things, I hope you can find the most suitable methods and tools for you!

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