Even CURL function can't scrape some urls - php

Question

I'm using CURL to scrape the html from url's. It works great in 80% of the urls I use. But some url's don't seem "scrapeable". For example, when I try to scrape http://www.thefancy.com , it doesn't work. the website keeps loading and at the end it doesn't return a result. the problem is testable at: http://www.itemmized.com/test/test/ this is my code:
if($_POST['submit']) {
function curl_exec_follow($ch, &$maxredirect = null) {
$mr = $maxredirect === null ? 5 : intval($maxredirect);
if (ini_get('open_basedir') == '' && ini_get('safe_mode' == 'Off')) {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, $mr > 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, $mr);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
} else {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false);
if ($mr > 0)
{
$original_url = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL);
$newurl = $original_url;
$rch = curl_copy_handle($ch);
curl_setopt($rch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($rch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_setopt($rch, CURLOPT_FORBID_REUSE, false);
do
{
curl_setopt($rch, CURLOPT_URL, $newurl);
$header = curl_exec($rch);
if (curl_errno($rch)) {
$code = 0;
} else {
$code = curl_getinfo($rch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
if ($code == 301 || $code == 302) {
preg_match('/Location:(.*?)\n/', $header, $matches);
$newurl = trim(array_pop($matches));
// if no scheme is present then the new url is a
// relative path and thus needs some extra care
if(!preg_match("/^https?:/i", $newurl)){
$newurl = $original_url . $newurl;
}
} else {
$code = 0;
}
}
} while ($code && --$mr);
curl_close($rch);
if (!$mr)
{
if ($maxredirect === null)
trigger_error('Too many redirects.', E_USER_WARNING);
else
$maxredirect = 0;
return false;
}
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $newurl);
}
}
return curl_exec($ch);
}
$ch = curl_init($_POST['form_url']);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$data = curl_exec_follow($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $data;

Answer 1

Try this.. hope this helps...
<?php
class Curl
{
public $cookieJar = "";
public function __construct($cookieJarFile = 'cookies.txt') {
$this->cookieJar = $cookieJarFile;
}
function setup()
{
$header = array();
$header[0] = "Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,";
$header[0] .= "text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5";
$header[] = "Cache-Control: max-age=0";
$header[] = "Connection: keep-alive";
$header[] = "Keep-Alive: 300";
$header[] = "Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7";
$header[] = "Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5";
$header[] = "Pragma: "; // browsers keep this blank.
curl_setopt($this->curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7');
curl_setopt($this->curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header);
curl_setopt($this->curl,CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookieJar);
curl_setopt($this->curl,CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookieJar);
curl_setopt($this->curl,CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($this->curl,CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($this->curl,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
}
function get($url)
{
$this->curl = curl_init($url);
$this->setup();
return $this->request();
}
function getAll($reg,$str)
{
preg_match_all($reg,$str,$matches);
return $matches[1];
}
function postForm($url, $fields, $referer='')
{
$this->curl = curl_init($url);
$this->setup();
curl_setopt($this->curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($this->curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($this->curl, CURLOPT_REFERER, $referer);
curl_setopt($this->curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields);
return $this->request();
}
function getInfo($info)
{
$info = ($info == 'lasturl') ? curl_getinfo($this->curl, CURLINFO_EFFECTIVE_URL) : curl_getinfo($this->curl, $info);
return $info;
}
function request()
{
return curl_exec($this->curl);
}
}
{
$curl = new Curl();
$html = $curl->get("http://www.thefancy.com");
echo "$html";
}
?>

Answer 2

Probably you're unable to scrape http://www.thefancy.com because every time you reach the bottom of the page new content is loading so actually you are trying to get an enormous amount of information with the cUrl probably that's where the problem is. You just get a timeout try setting the timeout in php.ini with a larger number and give it a try again. Probably its gona take a while to load but I think this way it's going to work.