CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphtmlparsing
Queeken
Queeken

Reputation:

Fastest way to retrieve a <title> in PHP

I'm doing a bookmarking system and looking for the fastest (easiest) way to retrieve a page's title with PHP.

It would be nice to have something like $title = page_title($url)

Upvotes: 35

Views: 59153

Answers (7)

pevinkinel
pevinkinel

Reputation: 411

I'm also doing a bookmarking system and found that since PHP 5 you can use stream_get_line to load the remote page only until the closing title tag (instead of loading the whole file), then get rid of what's before the opening title tag with explode (instead of a regex).

function page_title($url) {
  $title = false;
  if ($handle = fopen($url, "r"))  {
    $string = stream_get_line($handle, 0, "</title>");
    fclose($handle);
    $string = (explode("<title", $string))[1];
    if (!empty($string)) {
      $title = trim((explode(">", $string))[1]);
    }
  }
  return $title;
}

Last explode thanks to PlugTrade's answer who reminded me that title tags can have attributes.

Upvotes: 7

Alexei Tenitski
Alexei Tenitski

Reputation: 9360

or making this simple function slightly more bullet proof:

function page_title($url) {

    $page = file_get_contents($url);

    if (!$page) return null;

    $matches = array();

    if (preg_match('/<title>(.*?)<\/title>/', $page, $matches)) {
        return $matches[1];
    } else {
        return null;
    }
}


echo page_title('http://google.com');

Upvotes: 12

g023
g023

Reputation: 857

A function to handle title tags that have attributes added to them

function get_title($html)
{
    preg_match("/<title(.+)<\/title>/siU", $html, $matches);
    if( !empty( $matches[1] ) ) 
    {
        $title = $matches[1];

        if( strstr($title, '>') )
        {
            $title = explode( '>', $title, 2 );
            $title = $title[1];

            return trim($title);
        }   
    }
}

$html = '<tiTle class="aunt">jemima</tiTLE>';
$title = get_title($html);
echo $title;

Upvotes: 1

Lukas Liesis
Lukas Liesis

Reputation: 26403

You can get it without reg expressions:

$title = '';
$dom = new DOMDocument();

if($dom->loadHTMLFile($urlpage)) {
    $list = $dom->getElementsByTagName("title");
    if ($list->length > 0) {
        $title = $list->item(0)->textContent;
    }
}

Upvotes: 20

Ed Carrel
Ed Carrel

Reputation: 4254

<?php
    function page_title($url) {
        $fp = file_get_contents($url);
        if (!$fp) 
            return null;

        $res = preg_match("/<title>(.*)<\/title>/siU", $fp, $title_matches);
        if (!$res) 
            return null; 

        // Clean up title: remove EOL's and excessive whitespace.
        $title = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $title_matches[1]);
        $title = trim($title);
        return $title;
    }
?>

Gave 'er a whirl on the following input:

print page_title("http://www.google.com/");

Outputted: Google

Hopefully general enough for your usage. If you need something more powerful, it might not hurt to invest a bit of time into researching HTML parsers.

EDIT: Added a bit of error checking. Kind of rushed the first version out, sorry.

Upvotes: 55

null
null

Reputation: 7594

I like using SimpleXml with regex's, this is from a solution I use to grab multiple link headers from a page in an OpenID library I've created. I've adapted it to work with the title (even though there is usually only one).

function getTitle($sFile)
{
    $sData = file_get_contents($sFile);

    if(preg_match('/<head.[^>]*>.*<\/head>/is', $sData, $aHead))
    {   
        $sDataHtml = preg_replace('/<(.[^>]*)>/i', strtolower('<$1>'), $aHead[0]);
        $xTitle = simplexml_import_dom(DomDocument::LoadHtml($sDataHtml));

        return (string)$xTitle->head->title;
    }
    return null;
}

echo getTitle('http://stackoverflow.com/questions/399332/fastest-way-to-retrieve-a-title-in-php');

Ironically this page has a "title tag" in the title tag which is what sometime causes problems with the pure regex solutions.

This solution is not perfect as it lowercase's the tags which could cause a problem for the nested tag if formatting/case was important (such as XML), but there are ways that are a bit more involved around that problem.

Upvotes: 1

alex
alex

Reputation: 490153

Regex?

Use cURL to get the $htmlSource variable's contents.

preg_match('/<title>(.*)<\/title>/iU', $htmlSource, $titleMatches);

print_r($titleMatches);

see what you have in that array.

Most people say for HTML traversing though you should use a parser as regexs can be unreliable.

The other answers provide more detail :)

Upvotes: 5

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