What are the potential pitfalls of using Curl to download a webpage and extract data from it?

One potential pitfall of using Curl to download a webpage and extract data from it is that the webpage's structure may change, causing your extraction script to break. To mitigate this risk, you can use a library like SimpleHTMLDom to parse the HTML and extract data in a more robust way. 

// Include SimpleHTMLDom library
include('simple_html_dom.php');

// Download webpage content using Curl
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://example.com');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$html = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);

// Parse HTML content using SimpleHTMLDom
$dom = str_get_html($html);

// Extract data from webpage
$data = $dom->find('div#content', 0)->plaintext;

echo $data;

Keywords

Curl webpage download data extraction error handling HTML parsing

Related Questions