Why can I not scrape the title off this site? - php

Question

I'm using simple-html-dom to scrape the title off of a specified site.
<?php
include('simple_html_dom.php');
$html = file_get_html('http://www.pottermore.com/');
foreach($html->find('title') as $element)
echo $element->innertext . '<br>';
?>
Any other site I've tried works, apple.com for example.
But if I input pottermore.com, it doesn't output anything. Pottermore has flash elements on it, but the home screen I'm trying to scrape the title off of has no flash, just html.

Answer 1

This works for me :)
$url = 'http://www.pottermore.com/';
$html = get_html($url);
file_put_contents('page.htm',$html);//just to test what you have downloaded
echo 'The title from: '.$url.' is: '.get_snip($html, '<title>','</title>');
function get_html($url)
{
$ch = curl_init();
$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";
$header[] = "Pragma: "; //browsers keep this blank.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;U;Windows NT 5.0;en-US;rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, 'gzip,deflate');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 20);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, COOKIE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, COOKIE);
$result = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
return($result);
}
function get_snip($string,$start,$end,$trim_start='1',$trim_end='1')
{
$startpos = strpos($string,$start);
$endpos = strpos($string,$end,$startpos);
if($trim_start!='')
{
$startpos += strlen($start);
}
if($trim_end=='')
{
$endpos += strlen($end);
}
return(substr($string,$startpos,($endpos-$startpos)));
}

Answer 2

Just to confirm what others are saying, if you don't send a user agent string this site sends 403 Forbidden.
Adding this worked for me:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;U;Windows NT 5.0;en-US;rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)

Answer 3

The function file_get_html uses file_get_contents under the covers. This function can pull data from a URL, but to do so, it sends a User Agent string.
By default, this string is empty. Some webservers use this fact to detect that a non-browser is accessing its data and opt to forbid this.
You can set user_agent in php.ini to control the User Agent string that gets sent. Or, you could try:
ini_set('user_agent','UA-String');
with 'UA-String' set to whatever you like.