PHP file_get_contents booking.com Site

I try to get a booking.com page from a hotel to fetch the prices afterwards with regex. The problem is the following:

I call file_get_contents with parameter like checkin and checkout (file_get_contents("/hotel/at/myhotel.html?checkin=2017-10-12&checkout=2017-10-13")) dates so that the prices are shown to the visitor. If I watch the source code in the browser I see the entry:

b_this_url : '/hotel/at/myhotel.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAsoDkIcbmV1ZS1wb3N0LWhvbHpnYXUtaW0tbGVjaHRhbEgHYgVub3JlZmgOiAEBmAEHuAEHyAEM2AEB6AEB-AEDkgIBeagCAw;sid=58ccf750fc4acb908e20f0f28544c903;checkin=2017-10-12;checkout=2017-10-13;dist=0;sb_price_type=total;type=total&',

If I echo the string from file_get_contents the string looks like:

b_this_url : '/hotel/at/myhotel.html',

So all parameters that I passed to the url with file_get_contents are gone and therefore I couldn’t find any prices with my regex on the page …

Does anyone have a solution for this problem?

Answer

The webpage is not completely generated server-side, but it relies heavily on JavaScript after the HTML part loads. If you are looking for rendering the page as it looks in browser, I think you should use php curl instead of file_get_contents() for this kind of web scraping thing. I generated an automatic code for you from Postman (a google chrome extension / standalone desktop app) for your given url. The response contains the full url with params. See the image and I posted the code for you also.

<?php

$curl = curl_init();

curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
  CURLOPT_URL => "https://www.booking.com/hotel/at/hilton-innsbruck.de.html?checkin=2017-10-10%3Bcheckout%3D2017-10-11",
  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
  CURLOPT_ENCODING => "",
  CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,
  CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30,
  CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
  CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => "GET",
  CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array(
    "cache-control: no-cache",
    "postman-token: 581a75a7-6600-6ed6-75fd-5fb09c25d927"
  ),
));

$response = curl_exec($curl);
$err = curl_error($curl);

curl_close($curl);

if ($err) {
  echo "cURL Error #:" . $err;
} else {
  echo $response;
}