How can one extract data from external websites using PHP?

One way to extract data from external websites using PHP is by using cURL, a library that allows you to make HTTP requests and retrieve data from remote servers. By sending a GET request to the URL of the external website, you can fetch the HTML content of the page and then use PHP functions like preg_match or DOMDocument to extract the specific data you need. 

<?php

// URL of the external website
$url = 'https://www.example.com';

// Initialize cURL session
$ch = curl_init();

// Set cURL options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

// Execute cURL session and store the response
$response = curl_exec($ch);

// Close cURL session
curl_close($ch);

// Extract specific data from the response using regular expressions or DOMDocument

?>

Keywords

web scraping PHP cURL DOMDocument XPath data extraction

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