I need some piece of PHP script (or function) that can load a complete webpage including AJAX parts and images, I mean by giving the URL it returns me a complete HTML.

Up to now i have used "simple_html_dom" and some Curl based functions but none of these work for AJAX parts.

For this to work, the library probably has to simulate a browser with JavaScript, load the page and wait for all elements to load/transform, before taking the HTML.

It must be free, ideally open source.

  • What do you mean can load a complete web page? cURL will easily return you all the HTML content. If you really want to make a perfect copy with scripts and css running perfectly the easiest way might simply be to make an iframe. – Huey Apr 14 '15 at 13:08
  • I mean some script(or program) that can simulate browser and send javascript requests and get all the html code and then return all of the gathered HTML. – Hossein Apr 15 '15 at 11:02

I've used the PhantomJS headless browser, and it's great for doing this sort of thing - everything a browser does is provided to a scripting language instead of a GUI. I suspect much of the reason it works so well is that it uses the same V8 JavaScript-engine as Chrome... shame that's the wrong scripting-language for you...

I notice someone has created some PHP bindings to the Phantom API in a package called PHP PhantomJS. I haven't used it because I've never needed this functionality from PHP, but that's certainly the route I'd be looking into going down if I wanted to used a headless browser within PHP.


To accomplish this I would use Snoopy


To get started, I would check out This Guide, please tell me if it works out

  • Snnopy looks like 37KB of nicely laid-out PHP code to me? I've only had a quick glance, but I'm pretty sure it can't run JavaScript, unfortunately. – Antony Oct 25 '15 at 20:21

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