something is not working in CURL scraping - php

Question

I am trying to scrape torrentz2.eu search results by using old(dead) torrentz.eu scraper code:
when I run http://localhost/jits/torz/api.php?key=kabali
it showing me warning and null value.
Notice: Undefined variable: results_urls in /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/jits/torz/api.php on line 59
null
why?
can anybody tell me what's wrong with code.?
here is code:
<?php
$t= $_GET['key'];
// Defining the basic cURL function
function curl($url) {
// Assigning cURL options to an array
$options = Array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE, // Setting cURL's option to return the webpage data
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => TRUE, // Setting cURL to follow 'location' HTTP headers
CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => TRUE, // Automatically set the referer where following 'location' HTTP headers
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120, // Setting the amount of time (in seconds) before the request times out
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 120, // Setting the maximum amount of time for cURL to execute queries
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10, // Setting the maximum number of redirections to follow
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0", // Setting the useragent
CURLOPT_URL => $url, // Setting cURL's URL option with the $url variable passed into the function
);
$ch = curl_init(); // Initialising cURL
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options); // Setting cURL's options using the previously assigned array data in $options
$data = curl_exec($ch); // Executing the cURL request and assigning the returned data to the $data variable
curl_close($ch); // Closing cURL
return $data; // Returning the data from the function
}
?>
<?php
// Defining the basic scraping function
function scrape_between($data, $start, $end){
$data = stristr($data, $start); // Stripping all data from before $start
$data = substr($data, strlen($start)); // Stripping $start
$stop = stripos($data, $end); // Getting the position of the $end of the data to scrape
$data = substr($data, 0, $stop); // Stripping all data from after and including the $end of the data to scrape
return $data; // Returning the scraped data from the function
}
?>
<?php
$url = "https://torrentz2.eu/search?f=$t"; // Assigning the URL we want to scrape to the variable $url
$results_page = curl($url); // Downloading the results page using our curl() funtion
//var_dump($results_page);
//die();
$results_page = scrape_between($results_page, "<dl><dt>", "<a href=\"http://www.viewme.com/search?q=$t\" title=\"Web search results on ViewMe\">"); // Scraping out only the middle section of the results page that contains our results
$separate_results = explode("</dd></dl>", $results_page); // Expploding the results into separate parts into an array
// For each separate result, scrape the URL
foreach ($separate_results as $separate_result) {
if ($separate_result != "") {
$results_urls[] = scrape_between($separate_result, "\">", "<b>"); // Scraping the page ID number and appending to the IMDb URL - Adding this URL to our URL array
}
}
//print_r($results_urls); // Printing out our array of URLs we've just scraped
if($_GET["key"] === null) {
echo "Keyword Missing ";
} else if(isset($_GET["key"])) {
echo json_encode($results_urls);
}
?>
for old torrentz.eu scraper code ref: GIT repo

Answer 1

First thing you get NOTICE "Undefined variable: results_urls" because $results_urls is defined and used directly. Define it and then use it.
Do something like:-
// $results_urls defined here:-
$results_urls = [];
// For each separate result, scrape the URL
foreach ($separate_results as $separate_result) {
if ($separate_result != "") {
$results_urls[] = scrape_between($separate_result, "\">", "<b>"); // Scraping the page ID number and appending to the IMDb URL - Adding this URL to our URL array
}
}
Secondly the null is printed because $results_urls is not getting populated because $separate_results is not getting populated correctly. It just has one value which is empty.
I debugged further and found $results_page value is false. So whatever you are trying to do in "scrape_between" function is not working as expected. Fix your function.