Crawler Laravel Package

title: Custom link extraction weight: 2

You can customize how links are extracted from a page by creating a class that implements the UrlParser interface. The extractUrls method should return an array of ExtractedUrl objects:

use Spatie\Crawler\Enums\ResourceType;
use Spatie\Crawler\ExtractedUrl;
use Spatie\Crawler\UrlParsers\UrlParser;

class MyUrlParser implements UrlParser
{
    /** [@return](https://github.com/return) array<int, ExtractedUrl> */
    public function extractUrls(string $html, string $baseUrl): array
    {
        // parse the HTML and return an array of discovered URLs
        return [
            new ExtractedUrl(
                url: 'https://example.com/page',
                linkText: 'Example page',
                resourceType: ResourceType::Link,
            ),
        ];
    }
}

Each ExtractedUrl has the following properties:

• url: the discovered URL
• linkText: the text content of the link (optional)
• resourceType: the type of resource (Link, Image, Script, Stylesheet, or OpenGraphImage)
• malformedReason: if set, the URL is treated as malformed and will be skipped

By default, the LinkUrlParser is used. It extracts URLs from <a> tags, <link rel="next/prev">, and <link hreflang> elements. When resource extraction is enabled, it also extracts images, scripts, stylesheets, and Open Graph images.

To use your custom parser, pass it to the urlParser method:

use Spatie\Crawler\Crawler;

Crawler::create('https://example.com')
    ->urlParser(new MyUrlParser())
    ->start();

Crawling sitemaps

There is a built-in option to parse sitemaps instead of (or in addition to) following links. It supports sitemap index files.

use Spatie\Crawler\Crawler;

Crawler::create('https://example.com')
    ->parseSitemaps()
    ->start();