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

<?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.