Can I scrape AJAX-loaded content with Goutte?

Goutte is a screen scraping and web crawling library for PHP that is often used to scrape content from websites. However, Goutte does not support JavaScript or AJAX directly. This means that if the content you want to scrape is loaded dynamically via JavaScript or through AJAX calls, Goutte alone will not be able to access this content.

Content that is loaded dynamically with JavaScript or AJAX requires a browser or a browser-like environment to execute the JavaScript code and fetch the content. Since Goutte is based on Guzzle (an HTTP client for PHP) and uses Symfony components for the DOM crawler, it only handles the initial HTML page load and does not execute JavaScript.

To scrape AJAX-loaded content, you have a few options:

1. Use a headless browser: You can use headless browsers like Puppeteer (for Node.js), Selenium, or Playwright, which are capable of running a full browser in a headless mode. These tools can execute JavaScript and wait for AJAX calls to complete before scraping the content.

2. Inspect the Network Requests: Another approach is to inspect the network requests made by the browser to load the AJAX content. You can use the browser's developer tools to find the specific HTTP requests that fetch the data you need. Then, you can replicate these requests directly using an HTTP client like Guzzle in PHP. This method does not require executing JavaScript, but it does require you to understand the API endpoints that the web page uses to load data.

Here's how you might use approach #2 to scrape AJAX-loaded content with PHP using Guzzle:

<?php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use GuzzleHttp\Client;

$client = new Client();

// Inspect the network requests and find the URL and necessary headers or parameters
$response = $client->request('GET', 'https://example.com/ajax-endpoint', [
    'headers' => [
        'Accept' => 'application/json',
        // Other headers as required by the AJAX endpoint
    ],
    // Query parameters if it's a GET request or 'json' or 'form_params' for POST requests
]);

$body = $response->getBody();
$data = json_decode($body, true);

// Now $data contains the AJAX-loaded content
print_r($data);

If you must use a headless browser, here's a simple example using Puppeteer with Node.js:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com', { waitUntil: 'networkidle0' }); // Wait for all network connections to finish

  // Now you can evaluate JavaScript in the context of the page to get the content
  const content = await page.evaluate(() => {
    return document.querySelector('.ajax-loaded-element').innerHTML;
  });

  console.log(content);
  await browser.close();
})();

In summary, while Goutte is a great tool for scraping static content, you'll need to use other tools or methods to handle AJAX-loaded content.