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 the logo of the website) and a bit of text or a description if it’s available. Is there any simple way to do this without any external libraries/classes? Thanks
So far I’ve tried using the DOCDocument class, loading the HTML and displaying it on the screen, but I don’t think that’s the proper way to do it
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.
<?php
require 'simple_html_dom.php';
$html = file_get_html('http://www.google.com/');
$title = $html->find('title', 0);
$image = $html->find('img', 0);
echo $title->plaintext."<br>\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.
<?php
$data = file_get_contents('http://www.google.com/');
preg_match('/<title>([^<]+)<\/title>/i', $data, $matches);
$title = $matches[1];
preg_match('/<img[^>]*src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"][^>]*>/i', $data, $matches);
$img = $matches[1];
echo $title."<br>\n";
echo $img;
?>
Answer：
You may use either of these libraries. As you know each one has pros & cons, so you may consult notes about each one or take time & try it on your own:
- Guzzle: An Independent HTTP client, so no need to depend on cURL, SOAP or REST.
- Goutte: Built on Guzzle & some of Symfony components by Symfony developer.
- hQuery: A fast scraper with caching capabilities. high performance on scraping large docs.
- Requests: Famous for its user-friendly usage.
- Buzz: A lightweight client, ideal for beginners.
- ReactPHP: Async scraper, with comprehensive tutorials & examples.
You’d better check them all & use everyone in its best intended occasion.
Answer：
You can use SimpleHtmlDom for this. and then look for the title and img tags or what ever else you need to do.
Answer：
I like the Dom Crawler library. Very easy to use, has lots of options like:
$crawler = $crawler
->filter('body > p')
->reduce(function (Crawler $node, $i) {
// filters every other node
return ($i % 2) == 0;
});