Mechanize and BeautifulSoup for PHP?

Question

I was wondering if there was anything similar like Mechanize or BeautifulSoup for PHP?

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 17 '13 at 20:36

8

SimpleTest provides you with similar functionality:

edited Mar 17 '13 at 20:36

Aziz

answered Aug 12 '09 at 01:28

Jon

1

SimpleTest Browser class indeed does seem to do the job right however I was looking for something lighter, perhaps some library not oriented for Unit Testing? – Alix Axel Aug 12 '09 at 02:15
1

You can use SimpleTest's browser without the rest of the framework. It's a self-contained subcomponent. – troelskn Aug 12 '09 at 11:47
1

require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . '/simpletest.php'); and a dozen of other includes. – Alix Axel Aug 13 '09 at 18:11
And that site appears to now be dead – nathangiesbrecht Jun 24 '19 at 16:00
You can try this php package https://github.com/amsify42/php-domfinder – Mohd Samiullah Sep 02 '19 at 09:51

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 12 '09 at 04:20

8

I don't know how powerful BeautifulSoup is, so maybe this won't be as great ; but you could try using DOMDocument::loadHTML :

The function parses the HTML contained in the string source . Unlike loading XML, HTML does not have to be well-formed to load.

After using this, you should be able to access the HTML document using DOM methods -- including XPath queries.

answered Aug 12 '09 at 04:20

Pascal MARTIN

1

+1 for the native suggestion, although doing XPath queries is several times more complex than doing the same thing in BeautifulSoup. – Alix Axel Aug 12 '09 at 06:17

2 Answers2