使用DOMXpath提取JSON数据

Question

I have used php simple html dom to no success on this issue. Now I have gone to DOMDocument and DOMXpath and this does seem promising.

Here is my issue: I am trying to scrape data from a page which is loaded via a web service request after the page initially shows. It is only milliseconds but because of this, normal scraping shows a template value as opposed to the actual data. I have found the endpoint url using chrome developer network settings. So if I enter that url into the browser address bar the data displays nicely in JSON format. All Good.

My problem arises because any time the site is re-visited or the page refreshed, the suffix of the endpoint url is randomly-generated so I can't hard-code this url into my php file. For example the end of the url is "? =253648592" on first visit but on refresh it could be "? =375482910". The base of the url is static.

Without getting into headless browsers (I tried and MY head hurts!) is there a way to have Xpath find this random url when the page loads?

Sorry for being so long-winded but I wanted to explain as best I could.

Answer 1

It's probably much easier and faster to just use a regex if you only need one item/value from the HTML. I would like to give an example but therefor I would need a more extended snippet of how the HTML looks like that contains the endpoint that you want to fetch.

Is it possible to give a snippet of the HTML that contains the endpoint?