Sergey Zhuk has a new ReactPHP-related post to his site today showing you how to use the library to scrape content from the web quickly, making use of the asynchronous abilities the package provides.

Almost every PHP developer has ever parsed some data from the Web. Often we need some data, which is available only on some website and we want to pull this data and save it somewhere. It looks like we open a browser, walk through the links and copy data that we need. But the same thing can be automated via script. In this tutorial, I will show you the way how you can increase the speed of you parser making requests asynchronously.

In his example he creates a scraper that goes to a movie's page on the IMDB website and extracts the title, description, release date and the list of genres it falls into. Instead of creating a single-threaded process that can only fetch a single page at a time, he uses ReactPHP to speed things up and provide it a list of pages to fetch all at the same time. He starts by walking through the setup of the package and the creation of the browser instance. He then includes the code to make the request and crawl the contents of the result for the data. The post ends with the full code for the client and a way to add in a timeout in case the request fails.