You can use PHP to extract email addresses as an email scraper. There are a few methods to program a PHP web scraper depending on the source of the email address. Essentially, you can use PHP to scrape email addresses from webpages or scrape email addresses from a PHP string.

Identifying Email Addresses

For both methods, it’s prudent to first identify a valid email address for extraction. 

The first identifying factor of a valid email address is that the address uses online alphanumeric characters. These characters are all upper and lower case letters of the alphabet and the numbers 0-9. Email addresses cannot use special characters like $, ^, brackets, or less than and greater than symbols. 

Addresses can have hyphens -, or underscores _ so long as these aren’t the first character in the address. Finally, all email addresses use the @ symbol. When you use PHP as an email scraper, the program will determine email addresses with these characteristics as valid. 

Two Methods of Email Scraping with PHP 

You can extract email addresses with PHP either from webpages or from a string of PHP. Here is an example of PHP tutorials. 

Extracting All Email Addresses from a Webpage

If you need to create a database of emails for something like a marketing campaign, you can extract email addresses from its URL using PHP. 

Since PHP is in HTML, you can first put a code in HTML form. Set the action to the current index page, and the form submission should pass to the same page with the URL field value. From here, you can get the value of the URL address from Hash. Scan the page through its content with file_get_contents. 

With the Regex function, match the page’s content to output the email addresses. 

Extracting Email Addresses from a PHP String 

PHP will only verify emails through preg_match(), and preg_match(). 

With these, you can write a script for retrieving the email addresses from PHP. The output of using one of these functions should give you valid email addresses. 

PHP

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a server-side scripting language. It is embedded in HTML, and it has many uses. These include session tracking and creating databases. As a coding language, PHP aims to be forgiving. It is intended to be simple, efficient, secure, flexible, and familiar for users. It uses C-like syntax. 

Many users love PHP for its speed and efficiency. It supports major protocols like POP3, IMAP, and Java. 

PHP's common uses are system functions because it can create, open, close, write, and read files. It will handle forms and save file data. PHP allows you to send data through an email and then return data to the user. You can even use PHP to restrict users from accessing website pages or encrypt data. 

Alternatives to building a Scraping Tool

For those who don’t feel like going through all the fuss of building your own data scraping too, you could always use a professional tool instead. It is also possible to build your own API to do the job.