Web scraping in PHP

Question

I\'m looking for a way to make a small preview of another page from a URL given by the user in PHP.

I\'d like to retrieve only the title of the page, an image (like

Answer 1

I recommend you consider simple_html_dom for this. It will make it very easy.

Here is a working example of how to pull the title, and first image.

find('title', 0);
$image = $html->find('img', 0);

echo $title->plaintext."
\n";
echo $image->src;
?>

Here is a second example that will do the same without an external library. I should note that using regex on HTML is NOT a good idea.

([^<]+)<\/title>/i', $data, $matches);
$title = $matches[1];

preg_match('/]*src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"][^>]*>/i', $data, $matches);
$img = $matches[1];

echo $title."
\n";
echo $img;
?>