Scraping Craigslist Listings with PHP

This article will explain how to scrape Craigslist apartment listings using PHP and DOMDocument. We will go through each line of code to understand what it is doing.

First we need to install and include the PHP DOM extension:

// Install DOM extension
// Include DOMDocument
use DOMDocument;

The DOMDocument class allows us to parse and navigate HTML and XML documents.

Next we set the URL to scrape - Craigslist San Francisco apartments:

$url = '<https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa>';

We use file_get_contents() to get the page content:

$html = file_get_contents($url);

Now we can load the HTML into a DOMDocument:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($html);

If you check the source code of Craigslist listings you can see that the listings area code looks something like this…

You can see the code block that generates the listing…

<li class="cl-static-search-result" title="Situated in Sunnyvale!, Recycling Center, 1/BD">
            <a href="https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/apa/d/santa-clara-situated-in-sunnyvale/7666802370.html">
                <div class="title">Situated in Sunnyvale!, Recycling Center, 1/BD</div>

                <div class="details">
                    <div class="price">$2,150</div>
                    <div class="location">
                        sunnyvale
                    </div>
                </div>
            </a>
        </li>

its encapsulated in the cl-static-search-result class. We also need to get the title class div and the price and location class divs to get all the data

Craigslist organizes listings in

tags with class "cl-static-search-result". We use DOMXPath to find all of them:

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$listings = $xpath->query('//li[@class="cl-static-search-result"]');

We loop through each listing and extract the info using DOMElement:

foreach ($listings as $listing) {

  $title = $listing->getElementsByTagName('div')[0]->nodeValue;

  $price = $listing->getElementsByTagName('div')[1]->nodeValue;

  $location = $listing->getElementsByTagName('div')[2]->nodeValue;

  $link = $listing->getElementsByTagName('a')[0]->getAttribute('href');

  echo "$title $price $location $link<br>";

}

The full PHP code is:

// Install DOM extension
// Include DOMDocument
use DOMDocument;

$url = '<https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa>';

$html = file_get_contents($url);

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($html);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$listings = $xpath->query('//li[@class="cl-static-search-result"]');

foreach ($listings as $listing) {

  $title = $listing->getElementsByTagName('div')[0]->nodeValue;

  $price = $listing->getElementsByTagName('div')[1]->nodeValue;

  $location = $listing->getElementsByTagName('div')[2]->nodeValue;

  $link = $listing->getElementsByTagName('a')[0]->getAttribute('href');

  echo "$title $price $location $link<br>";

}

This walks through the PHP code to scrape Craigslist apartment listings and extract information from each listing.

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Scraping Craigslist Listings with PHP

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