PHP Tutorial – Retrieve WebPage Titles and Meta Tags

In case you do not know: a web page title is found between the <title> and </title> HTML tag while that of meta description is in <meta>.

Illustration

Let take this web-page url as an example https://w3guy.com/win-jump-start-php-book/.

It has a page title – Giveaway #1 – Win Free e-Copy of Jump Start PHP Book with HTML title tag <title>Giveaway #1 - Win Free e-Copy Of Jump Start PHP Book</title>.

Meta Description – <meta name="description" content="Win a free e-book copy of sitepoint's Jump Start PHP Book"/>

More information on Meta tag here.

Programmatically retrieving a web page title and meta tags is made possible by regex and PHP get_meta_tags function.

• Retrieving Web Page title

  Use the below PHP function powered by regex to retrieve the title of an HTML document / web-page.

  
  <?php
  	function getTitle($url) {
  		$data = file_get_contents($url);
      $title = preg_match('/<title[^>]*>(.*?)<\/title>/ims', $data, $matches) ? $matches[1] : null;
      return $title;
  	}?>
  

  To use this function, use the web-page URL as the getTitle() argument.
  For example, the code below will retrieve and output the title of Tech4sky.com

  
  echo getTitle('https://w3guy.com');
  

• Retrieving Web Page Meta-tags

  PHP get_meta_tags function extracts all meta tag content attributes from a file / URL parsed as the function argument and returns an array.
  Let’s see a code example of how this function works. Take cognizance of comments.

  
  <?php
  // Assuming the above tags are at 
  // https://w3guy.com/win-jump-start-php-book/
  $tags = get_meta_tags('https://w3guy.com/win-jump-start-php-book/');
  
  // Note: the array keys are the respective meta tag name attribute 
  // and are all lowercase 
  
  echo $tags['description']; // Win a free e-book copy of sitepoint's Jump Start PHP Book
  echo $tags['keywords'];     // Book Review,Giveaways,Download Jump Start PHP,freebies,giveaway
  echo $tags['twitter:creator'];       // @tech4sky
  echo $tags['generator'];  // WordPress 3.8
  

  Summary

  I have shown us how to programmatically retrieve a webpage’s title and Meta tags using PHP.
  Automagic retrieval of website titles and meta-tags are famous feature found in social bookmarking site like reddit, BlogEngae, Scoop.it etc.