PHP Curl to get ajax data or something like that - php

Question

I don't know if the question is right, but here is my problem..
I want to crawl this site: https://www.easports.com/fifa/ultimate-team/compete/leaderboards to get the leaderboard data.
When I do so with the following code, I only get the header + footer, but not the leaderboard data.
$client = new HttpClient();
$client->setAdapter("Zend\Http\Client\Adapter\Curl");
$client->setUri("https://www.easports.com/fifa/ultimate-team/compete/leaderboards");
$content = $client->send()->getBody();
var_dump($content);
Is there a problem with my curl or can this data not be curled? If so, maybe you got a solution for me ;)

Answer 1

If you open the Developer Tools in your browser you can see which extra requests are done to get the leaderboard filled. You should use the url https://www.easports.com/cgw/api/fifa/fut/leaderboard?platform=xboxone&region=ams&period=curr to get the leaderboard. This returns a JSON in the following layout:
[
{
"rank": 1,
"persona": "persona",
"hasProfile": false,
"wins": 1,
"skill": "6",
"qualified": 0
}]
Using your code this would be:
$client = new HttpClient();
$client->setAdapter("Zend\Http\Client\Adapter\Curl");
$client->setUri("https://www.easports.com/cgw/api/fifa/fut/leaderboard?platform=xboxone&region=ams&period=curr");
$content = $client->send()->getBody();
var_dump($content);
Which can then be processed for example with:
$client = new HttpClient();
$client->setAdapter("Zend\Http\Client\Adapter\Curl");
$client->setUri("https://www.easports.com/cgw/api/fifa/fut/leaderboard?platform=xboxone&region=ams&period=curr");
$content = $client->send()->getBody();
$leaderBoard = json_decode($content);
foreach($leaderBoard as $member){
echo $member['rank'] . '. ' . $member['persona'] . '(' . $member['wins'] . ' Wins)<br />';
}