How to Web Scrape

Web Scraping with PHP

Question:

How can I extract the title, an image, and text or description from a specified URL without external libraries in PHP?

Answer:

To simplify this task, consider utilizing the simple_html_dom library. The following example demonstrates how to obtain the title and first image using this library:

<code class="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;</code>

If you prefer to avoid external libraries, you can extract data using regular expressions, though this approach is not recommended for HTML.

<code class="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;</code>

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