Question

I have a function that gets the title from a HTML source (I curl it first then pass the source to this):

function get_dom_page_title($source){
    $doc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'utf-8');
    $doc->formatOutput = false;
    $doc->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
    $doc->strictErrorChecking = false; 
    @$doc->loadHTML('<?xml encoding="UTF-8">' . $source);

    $title = $doc->getElementsByTagName("title")->item(0)->nodeValue;

    if ($title !== ""){
        return (string)$title;
    }
    else{
        return false;
    }
}

However when I type in a youtube linkhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFeE4q4-M0o, the title returned is all weird: ‪Arsenal vs Benfica FT Highlights‬†- YouTube, or \n \u202aArsenal vs Benfica FT Highlights\u202c\u200f\n - YouTube\n.

How can I sort this?

Answer 1

Use PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

Code:

include("simple_html_dom.php");
$html = file_get_html('http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFeE4q4-M0o');
$title = $html->getElementsByTagName("title")->innertext;
echo preg_replace('/&#x([0-9a-f]+);/ei', 'chr(hexdec("$1"))', $title)

will output *Arsenal vs Merdosos FT Highlights,‏ – YouTube

PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser means less code and consistent results 🙂