getting meta tags info using curl and get_meta_tags()

Question

is there a way to use curl such that you can do something that is equivalent to the get_meta_tags() function in php? specifically to get the meta tags of an external site using

Answer 1

function file_get_contents_curl($url)
{
$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);

$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

return $data;
}

$html = file_get_contents_curl("http://www.example.com");

//parsing begins here:
$doc = new DOMDocument();
@$doc->loadHTML($html);
$nodes = $doc->getElementsByTagName('title');

//get and display what you need:
$title = $nodes->item(0)->nodeValue;

$metas = $doc->getElementsByTagName('meta');

for ($i = 0; $i < $metas->length; $i++)
{
$meta = $metas->item($i);
if($meta->getAttribute('name') == 'description')
    $description = $meta->getAttribute('content');
if($meta->getAttribute('name') == 'keywords')
    $keywords = $meta->getAttribute('content');
if($meta->getAttribute('language') == 'language');
    $language = $meta->getAttribute('language');
}

echo "Title: $title". '<br/><br/>';
echo "Description: $description". '<br/><br/>';
echo "Keywords: $keywords";

Answer 2

is there a way to use curl such that you can do something that is equivalent to the get_meta_tags() function in php

Nope, I don't think so.

The best way would be to fetch the data, and parse it using a HTML parser. Alternatively, there are several regex based approaches in the user contributed notes in the manual.