Random Quote Generator ( Part 1 ) - PHP Web Scraping

Introduction

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create a Random Quote Generator using PHP web scraping. Our objective is to scrape quotes along with their authors from the website Goodreads.com and store them in a structured manner for future use. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of the process, which is divided into three main phases.

Phase 1: Scraping Quotes

To start off, we will use PHP cURL to scrape quotes and authors from Goodreads. First, we open a PHP file named quote_scraper.php and initialize cURL.

Setting Up cURL

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0');

Loading the URL

We will scrape the quotes from a specific URL. We set the URL to the quotes page on Goodreads:

$url = "https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/love?page=1"; // starting URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

Executing cURL

Next, we execute the cURL request and store the result:

$result = curl_exec($ch);
print_r($result); // display the content for verification

Analyzing the Content

After verifying that we can load the page correctly, we use regular expressions to extract the quotes and author names from the page source. We will target specific HTML elements to capture the data.

Regular Expressions

We utilize the preg_match_all function to extract the quotes:

preg_match_all('/<div class="quoteText">(.+?)<\/div>/', $result, $matches);

Looping Through Pages

To scrape multiple pages, we set up a for loop to change the page number in the URL and repeat the scraping process for each page up to a defined limit.

Example Loop

for ($page = 1; $page <= 3; $page++) (
    $url = "https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/love?page=$page";
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    // Execute and process results...
)

Data Structure

For storing the scraped quotes and authors, we use an associative array that categorizes quotes by their respective pages and stores the quote data:

$data = []; // to hold results

$data[$page][$counter] = ['quote' => $quote, 'author' => $author];

After scraping, we can print the structured array to confirm that we have been successful in collecting the quotes and authors from multiple pages.

Moving Forward

In this part of the tutorial, we focused on web scraping using PHP cURL and regular expressions. The next phase will involve setting up a database to store all the scraped quotes and authors.

Keywords

• PHP
• Web Scraping
• cURL
• Goodreads
• Quotes
• Authors
• Regular Expressions
• Data Structure
• Database

FAQ

Q1: What is web scraping?
A1: Web scraping is the process of automatically extracting information from websites.

Q2: Why do we use cURL in PHP?
A2: cURL is a library that allows us to connect and communicate with servers, making it useful for requests to web pages.

Q3: Can I customize the tags for scraping?
A3: Yes, you can easily modify the array of tags in the script to scrape different categories of quotes from Goodreads.

Q4: How do I handle multiple pages of data?
A4: We use a loop to adjust the page number in the URL, allowing us to scrape data across multiple pages smoothly.

Q5: What will we do in the next part of the tutorial?
A5: In the next part, we will create a database and insert all the scraped quotes and authors for structured storage and easy retrieval.