Simple html dom file_get_html not working - is there any workaround?

Question

<?php
// Report all PHP errors (see changelog)
error_reporting(E_ALL);

include('inc/simple_html_dom.php');

    //base url
    $base = 'https://play.google.com/store/apps';

    //home page HTML
    $html_base = file_get_html( $base );

    //get all category links
    foreach($html_base->find('a') as $element) {
        echo "<pre>";
        print_r( $element->href );
        echo "</pre>";
    }

    $html_base->clear(); 
    unset($html_base);

?>

I have the above code and I'm trying to get certain elements of the Play Store page but it isn't returning anything. Is it possible that certain PHP functions might be disabled on the server to stop that?

The above code works perfectly on other sites.

Is there any workaround?

Answer 1

As I said, your example is working fine for me... But try this way using curl instead:

//base url
$base = 'https://play.google.com/store/apps';

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $base);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_REFERER, $base);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$str = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);

// Create a DOM object
$html_base = new simple_html_dom();
// Load HTML from a string
$html_base->load($str);

//get all category links
foreach($html_base->find('a') as $element) {
    echo "<pre>";
    print_r( $element->href );
    echo "</pre>";
}

$html_base->clear(); 
unset($html_base);

It gets all the links as expected:

And make sure you have php_openssl and php_curl installed...