Category: Development

Almost all developers have faced a parsing data task. Needs can be different –  from a product catalog to parsing stock pricing. Parsing is a very popular direction in back-end development; there are specialists creating quality parsers and scrapers. Besides, this theme is very interesting and appeals to the tastes of everyone who enjoys web. Today we review php tools used in parsing web content.

We want to show how one can make a Curl download file from a server. See comments in the code as explanations.

// open file descriptor
$fp = fopen ("image.png", 'w+') or die('Unable to write a file'); 
// file to download
$ch = curl_init('http://scraping.pro/ewd64.png');
// enable SSL if needed
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false); 
// output to file descriptor
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);          
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
// set large timeout to allow curl to run for a longer time
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 1000);     
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'any');
// Enable debug output
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);   
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);                               
fclose($fp);