Getting garbage output when scraping a webpage in PHP [duplicate] - php

Question

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Downloading files using GZIP
(4 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
I am trying to get the contents of a page from Amazon using file_get_html() but the output comes with weird characters on echo. Can anyone please explain how can I resolve this issue?
I also found the following two related questions on Stack Overflow but they did not solve my issue. :)
file_get_html() returns garbage
Uncompress gzip compressed http response
Here is my code:
$options = array(
'http'=>array(
'header'=>
"Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\r\n".
"Accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.5\r\n" .
"User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 Firefox/3.5.6\r\n"
)
);
$context = stream_context_create($options);
$amazon_url = 'https://www.amazon.com/my-url';
$amazon_html = file_get_contents($amazon_url, false, $context);
Here is the output I get:
��T]o�6}��`���0��݊-��"[�bh�tN�b0��.%%�$P��#�(Ų�� ������F#����A�
about 115k characters like this show up in the browser window.
These are my new headers:
$options = array(
'http'=>array(
'header'=>
"Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\r\n".
"Accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.5\r\n"
)
);
Will using cURL resolve this issue?
Update:
I tried cURL. Still getting the garbage output. Here are my response headers:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2018 20:29:28 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.33 (Win32) OpenSSL/1.1.0h PHP/7.2.5
X-Powered-By: PHP/7.2.5
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Can anyone explain the negative votes?
I did a research myself.
Found some related questions on Stack Overflow which did not solve my problem.
Provided all the information that I thought would be helpful.
What else should I include in the question?
Here is my whole code for curl at present. This is the URL I am scraping.
$handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_URL, $amazon_url);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$data = curl_exec($handle);
curl_close($handle);
echo $data;
The output is just a bunch of characters I mentioned above. Here are my request headers:
Host: localhost
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: AMCV_17EB401053DAF4840A490D4C%40AdobeOrg=-227196251%7CMCIDTS%7C17650%7CMCMID%7C67056225185486460220940124683302119708%7CMCAID%7CNONE%7CMCOPTOUT-1524907071s%7CNONE; mjx.menu=renderer%3ACommonHTML; _ga=GA1.1.2019605490.1529649408; csm-hit=adb:adblk_no&tb:s-3521C4J8F2EP1V0MMQEP|1542578145652&t:1542578146256
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
These are from the Network Tab. The response headers are the same as I mentioned above.
Here is the output after adding curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1); to my code:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Server Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=47474747; includeSubDomains;
preload x-amz-id-1: 7A162B8JKV6MGZQ3PCH2 Vary:
Accept-Encoding,User-Agent,X-Amzn-CDN-Cache Content-Encoding: gzip
x-amz-rid: 7A162B8JKV6MGZQ3PCH2 Cache-Control: no-transform
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2018 22:42:51 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked Connection: keep-alive Connection:
Transfer-Encoding Set-Cookie:
x-wl-uid=1a4u8+XgF+IhFF/iavy9mKZCAA0g4HiIYZXR8hKjxGtmOtBW+j67wGABv7ZOTxDRcab+7Qmpjqds=;

Answer 1

Here's the solution:
I ran into the same issue when scraping Amazon.
Simply add the following option before sending your cURL request:
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_ENCODING, 'gzip,deflate,sdch');