How to scrape content betweeen all link tags like <a href="">SCRAPE THIS</a> on a page?

Question

I'm trying to scrape a site's link texts, i.e SCRAPE THIS. I want to do this for all links on the page. So far I have this:

<?php

$target_url = "SITE I WANT TO SCRAPE";

// make the cURL request to $target_url
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$target_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
$html= curl_exec($ch);
if (!$html) {
    echo "<br />cURL error number:" .curl_errno($ch);
    echo "<br />cURL error:" . curl_error($ch);
    exit;
}

// parse the html into a DOMDocument
$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($html);

// grab all the on the page
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$hrefs = $xpath->evaluate("/html/body//a/text()");

for ($i = 0; $i < $hrefs->length; $i++) {
    $href = $hrefs->item($i);
    echo "<br />Link stored: $href";
}
?>

I'm pretty new to this stuff and can't figure out what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks!

Answer 1

In your for loop, $href is not a string. It's actually a DOMText node. In order to use it as a string, you need to access its nodeValue property.

for ($i = 0; $i < $hrefs->length; $i++) {
    $href = $hrefs->item($i);
    echo "<br />Link stored: $href->nodeValue";
}