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Web scraper

The web scraper is useful for feeds that display only a summary of articles, the scraper can download and parse the full content from the original website.

How the content grabber works?

  1. Try with rules first (XPath queries) for the domain name (see PicoFeed\Rules\)
  2. Try to find the text content by using common attributes for class and id
  3. Finally, if nothing is found, the feed content is displayed

The best results are obtained with XPath rules file.

Standalone usage

Fetch remote content:

<?php

use PicoFeed\Config\Config;
use PicoFeed\Scraper\Scraper;

$config = new Config;

$grabber = new Scraper($config);
$grabber->setUrl($url);
$grabber->execute();

// Get raw HTML content
echo $grabber->getRawContent();

// Get relevant content
echo $grabber->getRelevantContent();

// Get filtered relevant content
echo $grabber->getFilteredContent();

// Return true if there is relevant content
var_dump($grabber->hasRelevantContent());

Parse HTML content:

<?php

$grabber = new Scraper($config);
$grabber->setRawContent($html);
$grabber->execute();

Fetch full item contents during feed parsing

Before parsing all items, just call the method $parser->enableContentGrabber():

<?php

use PicoFeed\Reader\Reader;
use PicoFeed\PicoFeedException;

try {

    $reader = new Reader;

    // Return a resource
    $resource = $reader->download('http://www.egscomics.com/rss.php');

    // Return the right parser instance according to the feed format
    $parser = $reader->getParser(
        $resource->getUrl(),
        $resource->getContent(),
        $resource->getEncoding()
    );

    // Enable content grabber before parsing items
    $parser->enableContentGrabber();

    // Return a Feed object
    $feed = $parser->execute();
}
catch (PicoFeedException $e) {
    // Do Something...
}

When the content scraper is enabled, everything will be slower. For each item a new HTTP request is made and the HTML downloaded is parsed with XML/XPath.

Configuration

Enable content grabber for items

  • Method name: enableContentGrabber()
  • Default value: false (also fetch content if no rule file exist)
  • Argument value: bool (true scrape only webpages which have a rule file)
$parser->enableContentGrabber(false);

Ignore item urls for the content grabber

  • Method name: setGrabberIgnoreUrls()
  • Default value: empty (fetch all item urls)
  • Argument value: array (list of item urls to ignore)
$parser->setGrabberIgnoreUrls(['http://foo', 'http://bar']);

Set maximum of recursions (pages) for multi page articles

  • Method name: setMaxRecursions();
  • Default value: 25
  • Argument value: integer

How to write a grabber rules file?

Add a PHP file to the directory PicoFeed\Rules, the filename must be the same as the domain name:

Example with the BBC website, www.bbc.co.uk.php:

<?php
return array(
    'grabber' => array(
        '%.*%' => array(
            'test_url' => 'http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23911833',
            'body' => array(
                '//div[@class="story-body"]',
            ),
            'strip' => array(
                '//script',
                '//form',
                '//style',
                '//*[@class="story-date"]',
                '//*[@class="story-header"]',
                '//*[@class="story-related"]',
                '//*[contains(@class, "byline")]',
                '//*[contains(@class, "story-feature")]',
                '//*[@id="video-carousel-container"]',
                '//*[@id="also-related-links"]',
                '//*[contains(@class, "share") or contains(@class, "hidden") or contains(@class, "hyper")]',
            )
        )
    )
);

Each rule file can contain multiple rules, based so links to different website URLs can be handled differently. The first level key is a regex, which will be matched against the full path of the URL using preg_match, e.g. for http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23911833?test=1 the URL that would be matched is /news/world-middle-east-23911833?test=1

Each rule has the following keys:

  • body: An array of xpath expressions which will be extracted from the page
  • strip: An array of xpath expressions which will be removed from the matched content
  • test_url: A test url to a matching page to test the grabber

Don't forget to send a pull request or a ticket to share your contribution with everybody,

A more complex example:

Let's say you wanted to extract a div with the id video if the article points to an URL like http://comix.com/videos/423, audio if the article points to an URL like http://comix.com/podcasts/5 and all other links to the page should instead take the div with the id content. The following rulefile would fit that requirement and would be stored in a file called lib/PicoFeed/Rules/comix.com.php:

return array(
    'grabber' => array(
        '%^/videos.*%' => array(
            'test_url' => 'http://comix.com/videos/423',
            'body' => array(
                '//div[@id="video"]',
            ),
            'strip' => array()
        ),
        '%^/podcasts.*%' => array(
            'test_url' => 'http://comix.com/podcasts/5',
            'body' => array(
                '//div[@id="audio"]',
            ),
            'strip' => array()
        ),
        '%.*%' => array(
            'test_url' => 'http://comix.com/blog/1',
            'body' => array(
                '//div[@id="content"]',
            ),
            'strip' => array()
        )
    )
);

List of content grabber rules

Rules are stored inside the directory lib/PicoFeed/Rules