PHP is an excellent choice for web scraping, especially when building web applications or APIs. With PHP's built-in cURL support and the Ujeebu API, you can easily extract data from any website.
Before starting, you'll need:
✅ cURL is enabled
PHP Version: 7.4.3-4ubuntu2.29
Let's start with the simplest form of web scraping - fetching HTML content from a static webpage.
❌ Error: HTTP 401
{
"message":"Invalid authentication credentials"
}
Modern websites often use JavaScript frameworks (React, Vue, Angular) to render content dynamically. For these sites, you need JavaScript rendering.
Instead of parsing HTML manually, use Extract Rules - a powerful feature that lets you define extraction patterns using CSS selectors.
The most advanced method: use AI to extract data using natural language prompts instead of CSS selectors.
Add delays between requests to avoid overwhelming servers and getting rate-limited. Use 1-2 second delays for production scraping.
Always check HTTP status codes and handle errors gracefully. Implement retry logic for transient failures.
Generate rules once with AI, then reuse them for free. Much more cost-effective than AI scraping for repeated tasks.
Cache scraped data to avoid redundant requests. Use file-based or database caching for production applications.
Try the API in our interactive playground or explore the documentation.