How do I handle redirects when scraping with DiDOM?

DiDOM is a simple and fast HTML/XML parser for PHP. When dealing with web scraping, handling redirects is a common requirement, as the target URL may redirect to another page, which contains the actual content you want to scrape.

DiDOM itself doesn't handle the HTTP requests; it only deals with parsing the provided HTML content. To handle redirects, you need to use a separate HTTP client that supports following redirects, and then pass the final HTML content to DiDOM for parsing.

Here's an example of handling redirects using cURL in PHP before parsing the content with DiDOM:

<?php
require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';

// The initial URL you want to scrape
$url = 'http://example.com';

// Initialize cURL
$ch = curl_init($url);

// Set cURL options to follow redirects
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

// Execute the request
$response = curl_exec($ch);

// Check for errors
if (curl_errno($ch)) {
    throw new Exception(curl_error($ch));
}

// Close the cURL session
curl_close($ch);

// Now you have the final HTML after any redirects, parse it with DiDOM
$document = new \DiDom\Document($response);

// Now you can use DiDOM functions to scrape the content
// For example, to get the title of the page
$title = $document->has('title') ? $document->first('title')->text() : 'No title';

echo $title;

In this script, cURL is used to fetch the web page, and it's set up to follow any redirects. The resulting HTML content is then loaded into a DiDom\Document object for parsing.

If you're using Guzzle, a popular PHP HTTP client, to handle HTTP requests, you can handle redirects like this:

<?php
require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';

use GuzzleHttp\Client;
use DiDom\Document;

// The initial URL you want to scrape
$url = 'http://example.com';

$client = new Client([
    // Redirect settings
    'allow_redirects' => [
        'max'             => 10,        // Maximum number of redirects to follow
        'strict'          => true,      // Use "strict" RFC compliant redirects
        'referer'         => true,      // Add a Referer header
        'protocols'       => ['http', 'https'], // Only allow http and https URLs
        'track_redirects' => true
    ]
]);

// Send the request and get the response
$response = $client->get($url);

// The body of the response
$body = (string) $response->getBody();

// Load the response body into DiDOM for parsing
$document = new Document($body);

// Now you can use DiDOM functions to scrape content
// For example, to get the title of the page
$title = $document->has('title') ? $document->first('title')->text() : 'No title';

echo $title;

In this example, Guzzle handles the HTTP request and automatically follows redirects based on the configuration provided. The final HTML content is then passed to DiDOM for parsing.

Remember that when scraping websites, you should always check the robots.txt file for the website you are scraping to make sure you are allowed to scrape their pages and follow their scraping policies. Additionally, you should handle web requests responsibly by not overloading the webserver with too many rapid requests.