Question

I’m doing a bookmarking system and looking for the fastest (easiest) way to retrieve a page’s title with PHP.

It would be nice to have something like $title = page_title($url)

Answer 1

<?php     function page_title($url) {         $fp = file_get_contents($url);         if (!$fp)              return null;          $res = preg_match('/<title>(.*)<\/title>/siU', $fp, $title_matches);         if (!$res)              return null;           // Clean up title: remove EOL's and excessive whitespace.         $title = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $title_matches[1]);         $title = trim($title);         return $title;     } ?> 

Gave ‘er a whirl on the following input:

print page_title('http://www.google.com/'); 

Outputted: Google

Hopefully general enough for your usage. If you need something more powerful, it might not hurt to invest a bit of time into researching HTML parsers.

EDIT: Added a bit of error checking. Kind of rushed the first version out, sorry.