retrieving the title of a remote page

Question

I have a little problem with the pattern for retrieving the title of the remote page while same pattern is giving the result here is the sample.

preg_match_all('|<title>(.*)</title>|U',$this->data,$title);

is for other url and giving the result . While following return the empty array

preg_match_all('|<title>(.*)</title>|U', $valD, $title);

can any on tell me the is any problem with these lines.

Where $this->data and $valD holds the content of two different urls for different servers.

Please help me. I tried it to solve it but I failed to solve it. So I requesting the you all to tell me my faults in this.

Thank you.

Have a look at [this question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags). Use an HTML parser to convert the document into DOM and then use DOM traversal methods or XPath. — Felix Kling, Oct 17 '11 at 07:36
Have you initialized `$title` to an empty array? Have you turned on error reporting (`error_reporting(E_ALL | E_NOTICE)`)? — knittl, Oct 17 '11 at 07:39
The problem must be that your regex isn't matching for one site - Can you post the snippet of HTML that isn't matching which includes the tag for that page? — nickb, Oct 17 '11 at 07:39
Parsing HTML with regexen is brittle. Don't do it except if you have absolute control over the remote page AND only for elements which can't nest recursively. — nalply, Oct 17 '11 at 07:45
possible duplicate of [Grabbing title of a website using DOM](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5869925/grabbing-title-of-a-website-using-dom) — Gordon, Oct 17 '11 at 07:56

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 17 '11 at 07:38

2

If you are matching HTML, then you should also expect uppercase tags. Add the |i flag therefore.

The title tag might also contain newlines, which is why the |s flag should also be present.

 preg_match_all('|<title>(.*)</title>|Uis', ...

answered Oct 17 '11 at 07:38

mario

and what if someone does: stuff title>? – nalply Oct 17 '11 at 07:46
@nalply: It would simply not match. – mario Oct 17 '11 at 07:54
1

Also, using `|` as a regex delimiter is not a good idea. Better use a character that's not also a regex metacharacter. `%...%` or `~...~` come to mind. – Tim Pietzcker Oct 17 '11 at 07:57
@mario, of course and that's an example why regexen are brittle :-) – nalply Oct 17 '11 at 09:34

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 17 '11 at 07:42

0

Maybe there is a line break in the title tag such like this:

<title>
The page title
</title>

Try

preg_match_all('|<title>[:space:]*(.*)[:space:]*</title>|U', $valD, $title);

instead.

answered Oct 17 '11 at 07:42

Alex

2 Answers2