Search code examples
phpweb-scrapingcurl

Load next set results from URL - PHP cURL


Looking for some help, i am using curl to extract data from said website, on the site they have 10 results on the first page and then the next set of 10 results are on the next with ?page=2 appended and so on.

I did try a loop but it didnt seem to work, any suggestion i could work with, preferably a scroll to load more but want to get he curl part correct first.

Below is the test code i am using as example, the full version includes post parameter appended to the URL but just need the next results

<?php

// Main url but the next result will be on https://example.org/data/?page=2
$url = "https://example.org/data";

$result = get($url) ;

function get ($url) {
    $curl = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.85 Safari/537.36');
    $result = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close($curl);
    return $result;
}

preg_match_all('!<h1>(.*?)<\/h1>!',$result,$title);

for ($i = 0; $i < count($result[1]); $i++) {
    echo '<h1>' . $title[1][$i] . '"</h1>';
}

To all that is reading this for learning as i did, the code above works also for basic extraction of the H1 header on any given URL once the values match, if i can help with any basic questions for new coders i will.

Modified example showing a page 1,2 example in the URL.

<?php

for ($i = 1; $i <= 2; $i++) {
$url = "https://www.gamespot.com/search/?q=gta&page=". $i;
echo $url . "<br>";
}

$result = get($url) ;

function get ($url) {
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.85 Safari/537.36');
$result = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
return $result;
}

preg_match_all('!<h4 class="media-title" style="margin:0;padding-bottom:4px;">
                            <span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href=".*?">(.*?)<\/a><\/span>
          <\/h4>!',$result,$title);

for ($i = 0; $i < count($title[1]); $i++) {
echo '<p>' . $title[1][$i] . '</p>';
}

Solution

  • Ok so after many hours of research and failures i have done the following which works as i wanted to so i wish to share this with you.

    I set some variables like with the values below

    // Get the value of $pg through the GET value of 'page'
    $pg = $_GET['page'];
    
    // Increase the $pg variable when clicking $next/$prev with +1 or -1
    $next = $pg +1;
    $prev = $pg -1;
    
    // Append the $pg value to the CURL url
    $url = "https://www.gamespot.com/search/?q=gta&page=".$pg;
    
    // The next & previous
    <?php
      echo '<div class="btn-group special">';
       // Added an IF statement so that this does not go to the -1 values
       if ($prev >= 1) {
        echo '<a href="results.php?page='.$prev.'" class="btn btn-info" role="button"><i class="fas fa-chevron-left"></i></a>';
       } else {
        // Nothing to display
       }
      echo '<a href="results.php?page='.$next.'" class="btn btn-info" role="button"><i class="fas fa-chevron-right"></i></a>';
      echo '</div>'
    ?>