On the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a new post showing you how to use the Symfony DomCrawler component to scrape content, images mostly, from a remote website. The DomCrawler is one component of the Symfony framework.

A photographer friend of mine implored me to find and download images of picture frames from the internet. I eventually landed on a web page that had a number of them available for free but there was a problem: a link to download all the images together wasn't present. I didn't want to go through the stress of downloading the images individually, so I wrote this PHP class to find, download and zip all images found on the website.

He talks briefly about how the class works and then gets into the contents of the class. He walks through all the code and explains in chunks what each part does in the lifecycle of the request. The end result is a Zip archive file of all images from the remote website, packaged up for easy transport.