What are the potential pitfalls of using fread in PHP for web scraping or crawling tasks?

Using fread in PHP for web scraping or crawling tasks can be inefficient and error-prone, especially when dealing with large amounts of data. It can lead to memory consumption issues and slow performance. Instead, it is recommended to use file_get_contents or cURL functions in PHP for better handling of web scraping tasks. 

// Using file_get_contents for web scraping
$url = 'https://example.com';
$html = file_get_contents($url);

// Using cURL for web scraping
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$html = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Keywords

fread PHP web scraping crawling pitfalls

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