Fastest way to retrieve a <title> in PHP

Question

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

Answer 1

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;
    }
}

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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;

Answer 4

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 :)

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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');