Goutte is a screen scraping and web crawling library for PHP that leverages the Symfony components for its functionality. It's designed to extract data from web pages using a simple and intuitive API.
When it comes to handling meta refresh redirects, Goutte itself does not automatically handle them out of the box. Meta refresh is a method of instructing a web browser to automatically refresh the current web page or frame after a given time interval, and it can also be used to redirect the browser to another page.
These redirects are implemented in HTML using the <meta> tag within the <head> section of the HTML document like so:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://example.com/">
This tag tells the browser to redirect to http://example.com/ after 5 seconds.
Since Goutte is based on Symfony's BrowserKit and HttpFoundation components, it can handle HTTP redirections (status code 3xx), but you would need to manually handle meta refresh redirects. Here's how you might implement this in PHP:
use Goutte\Client;
$client = new Client();
// Send a request to the website.
$crawler = $client->request('GET', 'http://example.com');
// Check if there is a meta refresh tag.
$metaRefresh = $crawler->filter('meta[http-equiv="refresh"]')->first();
if ($metaRefresh->count() !== 0) {
// Extract the content attribute of the meta tag.
$content = $metaRefresh->attr('content');
$urlAndTime = explode(';', $content);
if (count($urlAndTime) === 2) {
$url = substr($urlAndTime[1], strpos($urlAndTime[1], "=") + 1);
// Follow the URL in the meta refresh tag.
$crawler = $client->request('GET', $url);
}
}
// Continue with the logic after following the redirect.
This code will check if there is a meta refresh tag on the page. If one exists, the script will extract the URL from the content attribute and manually send a new GET request to the URL specified in the meta refresh tag.
Keep in mind that meta refresh redirects are less common in modern web development compared to HTTP redirects, and they are generally not recommended for use due to usability and accessibility concerns. If you're scraping websites, you should be prepared to handle both kinds of redirects as needed.
