Web Scraping Amazon with PHP | The Programmer's Library

This snippet of PHP code demonstrates web scraping. It reads a sample page from Amazon.com, compares the HTML text against certain class name and outputs that matched text in an RSS feed.

<?php

$now = date("D, d M Y H:i:s T");

$ASIN = $url = $img = $title = $bio = $name = "";

$head = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>';

$head .= '<rss version="2.0">';

$head .= '<channel>';

$head .= '<title>Amazon </title>';

$head .= '<link>http://www.amazon.com</link>';

$head .= '<description>Amazon RSS Feed</description>';

$url = "http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store/zgbs/digital-text/";

$text = file_get_html($url);

foreach ($text->find("div.zg_item_compact") as $class) {

foreach ($class->find('strong.price') as $price) {

if ($price->plaintext == "Free") {

$rssfeed .= '<item>';

foreach ($class->find("div.zg_title a") as $book) {

preg_match("/\/dp\/(.*)\/ref/", $book->href, $matches);

$ASIN = trim($matches[1]);

$url = "http://www.amazon.com/dp/" . $ASIN . "/?tag=publisherapi-20";

$img = "http://images.amazon.com/images/P/" . $ASIN . ".01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg";

$title = htmlentities(trim($book->plaintext));

$rssfeed .= '<title>' . $title . '</title>';

$rssfeed .= '<link>' . $url . '</link>';

$rssfeed .= '<guid isPermaLink="true">' . $url . '</guid>';

$rssfeed .= '<description>';

}

foreach ($class->find("div.zg_byline a") as $author) {

$bio = "http://www.amazon.com" . $author->href . "/?tag=publisherapi-20";

$name = htmlentities(trim($author->plaintext));

$rssfeed .= 'By <a href="' . $authorURL . '">' . $name . '</a>';

}

$rssfeed .= '</description>';

$rssfeed .= '<pubDate>' . $now . '</pubDate>';

$rssfeed .= '</item>';

}

$footer = '</channel></rss>';

$rssfeed = $head . $rssfeed . $footer;

$fh = fopen("amazon.rss", "w");

fwrite($fh, $rssfeed);

fclose($fh);