PHP Scraper appears to be in an infinite loop - php

Question

(I'm scraping this stuff with the permission of the website in question, by the way).
Pretty simple web scraper, was working fine when I was loading all the links by hand, but when I've tried to load them in via JSON and variables (so I can do lots of scraping with the one script and make the process more modular by just adding more links to JSON) it runs on an infinite loop.
(Page has been loading for about 15 minutes now)
Here is my JSON. Only one store is in there for testing purposes but there is going to be about 15 more.
[
{
"store":"Incu Men",
"cat":"Accessories",
"general_cat":"Accessories",
"spec_cat":"accessories",
"url":"http://www.incuclothing.com/shop-men/accessories/",
"baseurl":"http://www.incuclothing.com",
"next_select":"a.next",
"prod_name_select":".infobox .fn",
"label_name_select":".infobox .brand",
"desc_select":".infobox .description",
"price_select":"#price",
"mainImg_select":"",
"more_imgs":".product-images",
"product_url":".hproduct .photo-link"
}
]
Here is the PHP scraper code:
<?php
//Set infinite time limit
set_time_limit (0);
// Include simple html dom
include('simple_html_dom.php');
// Defining the basic cURL function
function curl($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
// Initialising cURL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
// Setting cURL's URL option with the $url variable passed into the function
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
// Setting cURL's option to return the webpage data
$data = curl_exec($ch);
// Executing the cURL request and assigning the returned data to the $data variable
curl_close($ch);
// Closing cURL
return $data;
// Returning the data from the function
}
function getLinks($catURL, $prodURL, $baseURL, $next_select) {
$urls = array();
while($catURL) {
echo "Indexing: $url" . PHP_EOL;
$html = str_get_html(curl($catURL));
foreach ($html->find($prodURL) as $el) {
$urls[] = $baseURL . $el->href;
}
$next = $html->find($next_select, 0);
$url = $next ? $baseURL . $next->href : null;
echo "Results: $next" . PHP_EOL;
}
return $urls;
}
$string = file_get_contents("jsonWorkers/incuMens.json");
$json_array = json_decode($string,true);
foreach ($json_array as $value){
$baseURL = $value['baseurl'];
$catURL = $value['url'];
$store = $value['store'];
$general_cat = $value['general_cat'];
$spec_cat = $value['spec_cat'];
$next_select = $value['next_select'];
$prod_name = $value['prod_name_select'];
$label_name = $value['label_name_select'];
$description = $value['desc_select'];
$price = $value['price_select'];
$prodURL = $value['product_url'];
if (!is_null($value['mainImg_select'])){
$mainImg = $value['mainImg_select'];
}
$more_imgs = $value['more_imgs'];
$allLinks = getLinks($catURL, $prodURL, $baseURL, $next_select);
}
?>
Any ideas why the script would be running infinitely and not returning anything/stopping/printing anything to screen? I'm just gonna let it run until it stops. When I was doing this by hand it would only take a minute or so, sometimes less, so I'm sure it's a problem with my variables/json but I can't for the life of me see what the issues lie.
Can anyone take a quick look and point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

There is a problem with your while($catURL) loop. What do you want to do ?
Moreover, you can force to display information on your browser with the flush() command.