Question

The following PHP code uses cURL, XPath and displays all the links on a certain page ($target_url).

** What I’m trying to do is figure out how to display only the the anchor text (the linked words in an href) on a given page when I supply the website value.

For example…I want to search “randomwebsite.com” to see if there is a link with my target_url (ex. ebay.com) and display just the anchor text of “auction website”

http://www.ebay.com’>auction website

---

<?php


$target_url = "http://www.ebay.com";
$userAgent = 'Googlebot/2.1 (http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)';

// make the cURL request to $target_url
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$target_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
$html= curl_exec($ch);
if (!$html) {
    echo "<br />cURL error number:" .curl_errno($ch);
    echo "<br />cURL error:" . curl_error($ch);
    exit;
}

// parse the html into a DOMDocument
$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($html);

// grab all the on the page
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$hrefs = $xpath->query('/html/body//a');

for ($i = 0; $i < $hrefs->length; $i++) {
    $href = $hrefs->item($i);
    $url = $href->getAttribute('href');
    echo "<br />Link: $url";
}

?>

Answer 1

You would get the text with $href->nodeValue inside your example loop. That doesn’t really account for what you may want to do if it’s an image tag or such though, but I think this is what you were specifically asking.