Question

I make a simple application to take recipe info from websites like allrecipes.com. I’m using preg_match, but something is not working.

$geturl = file_get_contents("http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Brown-Sugar-Smokies/Detail.aspx?src=rotd");
          preg_match('#<title>(.*) - Allrecipes.com</title>#', $geturl, $match);
          $name = $match[1];
          echo $name;

I’m just trying to take the title of the page (minus the - Allrecipes.com part) and put it into a variable, but all that turns up is blank.

Answer 1

There were two problems in this pattern. First, there was a newline symbol after the <title> which wasn’t captured by . (as without /s modifier . is literally ‘any symbol but EOL one’). Second, the Allrecipes.com text was actually NOT followed by </title> substring, there was a newline separating them.

Taking into account the fact that \s covers both normal whitespace and line separating one, you can just alter your regex like this:

'#<title>\s*(.*?) - Allrecipes.com\s*</title>#s'

/s modifier is not actually relevant here (cudos to minitech for noticing that), as the title in this recipe is one-line, and all “\n” symbols will be covered by \s* subexpression. But I’d still suggest leaving it there, so that multi-line titles won’t catch you off-guard.

I’ve replaced .* with .*? for efficiency sake here: as the string you’re looking for is quite short, it makes sense to use non-greedy quantifier here.