Collecting hotel reviews with PHP and cURL

Ammar Saiful · 2024-12-19T10:36:14+00:00

Scraping hotel reviews can provide valuable insights for travelers or researchers, and PHP combined with cURL is a powerful tool for this task. Reviews are typically found in structured HTML elements, often accompanied by user names, ratings, and timestamps. Using PHP’s DOMDocument and DOMXPath, you can parse the HTML and extract the required data. For dynamic content, analyzing network traffic and capturing JSON responses can make the process more efficient. If pagination is involved, the scraper should be capable of navigating through multiple pages to gather all reviews.Here’s an example using PHP and cURL to extract hotel reviews:<?php $ch curl_init();curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com/hotel-reviews");curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);$html curl_exec($ch);curl_close($ch);$dom new DOMDocument();@$dom->loadHTML($html);$xpath new DOMXPath($dom);$reviews $xpath->query("//div");foreach ($reviews as $review) { $user $xpath->query(".//span", $review)->item(0)->nodeValue; $text $xpath->query(".//p", $review)->item(0)->nodeValue; $rating $xpath->query(".//span", $review)->item(0)->nodeValue; echo "User: $user, Rating: $rating, Review: $text\n";}?>Handling large-scale scraping may require implementing proxy rotation and adding delays between requests to avoid triggering anti-scraping measures. How do you manage scraping reviews from websites with CAPTCHAs?

General Web Scraping

Collecting hotel reviews with PHP and cURL

Posted by Ammar Saiful on 12/19/2024 at 10:36 am
Scraping hotel reviews can provide valuable insights for travelers or researchers, and PHP combined with cURL is a powerful tool for this task. Reviews are typically found in structured HTML elements, often accompanied by user names, ratings, and timestamps. Using PHP’s DOMDocument and DOMXPath, you can parse the HTML and extract the required data. For dynamic content, analyzing network traffic and capturing JSON responses can make the process more efficient. If pagination is involved, the scraper should be capable of navigating through multiple pages to gather all reviews.
Here’s an example using PHP and cURL to extract hotel reviews:
```
<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com/hotel-reviews");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$html = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$reviews = $xpath->query("//div[@class='review-item']");
foreach ($reviews as $review) {
    $user = $xpath->query(".//span[@class='user-name']", $review)->item(0)->nodeValue;
    $text = $xpath->query(".//p[@class='review-text']", $review)->item(0)->nodeValue;
    $rating = $xpath->query(".//span[@class='review-rating']", $review)->item(0)->nodeValue;
    echo "User: $user, Rating: $rating, Review: $text\n";
}
?>
```
Handling large-scale scraping may require implementing proxy rotation and adding delays between requests to avoid triggering anti-scraping measures. How do you manage scraping reviews from websites with CAPTCHAs?
Hieronim Sanjin replied 2 days, 5 hours ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
2 Replies

Jeanne Dajana

Member
12/20/2024 at 8:32 am

For sites with CAPTCHAs, I integrate third-party CAPTCHA-solving services, though I try to minimize triggering them by reducing request frequency.
Hieronim Sanjin

Member
12/20/2024 at 12:56 pm

When dealing with dynamic content, I prefer capturing JSON responses directly. This avoids rendering HTML and simplifies the extraction process.

Collecting hotel reviews with PHP and cURL

Jeanne Dajana

Hieronim Sanjin