Determine page title

jrahma

Hi,

when you add a link in your Linkedin or facebook it will automatically determine the page title.. and when I say the title I don't mean the mata tag title but the real page title, that's what I have noticed.... so how can i do this using PHP?

Thanks,
Jassim

bradgrafelman

jrahma;10991355 wrote:
I don't mean the mata tag title but the real page title

What do you mean the "mata[sic] tag title" ?

I would guess that one popular solution would be to use [man]DOM[/man].

EDIT: Note another possibility might be to use a regular expression like:

@<title>([^<]+)</title>@i

but note that using such regular expressions to parse HTML code is going to be error-prone and thus inferior (IMHO) to simply using a DOM approach.

sneakyimp

To add to what BG said, using [man]preg_match[/man] is a function you can use to search through text for patterns using what's called a regular expression. It's error-prone, as BG said because you can't really depend on people to create their HTML properly and there may be extra spaces or newline chars or character case issues which would cause your search to not find what it was looking for.

DOM is an approach, much like in javascript, where you can treat the content of an HTML page as a big, complex object. The downside of this approach is that it can also break if the page's HTML is incorrectly structured. It can also cause performance issues with large pages -- to use DOM on a page, you generally have to parse the entire thing which can consume CPU/memory resources.

jrahma

for example..

if you you check this URL:

http://x.co/bDHC

The title in the <meta> tag is:

Android Hits 200 Million Activations - Mobility - Smartphones - Informationweek

but when I type it in linkedin it will automatically detect the title as:

Android Hits 200 Million Activations

which is the article's title..

I am now sure if <headline> meta tag has anything to do with it because the source of the page shows:

<meta name="headline" content="Android Hits 200 Million Activations" />