Get Webpage Title from URL in PHP not working - php

Question

I'm trying to receive a certain url through post and scrape the title of that HTML page. Then, I will store the title of the page into my MySQL Database.
Before Implementing this feature to my actual online server, I tested the page_title function (which is the custom function that reads the title of the HTML page of a given URL) on my local server, and it worked fine. Here is the code I used on my local server.
<?php
$link = $_POST['link'];
function page_title($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;
}
$title= page_title($link);
echo $title; ?>
However, when I used this exact same code on my online server to actually push the data in to the MYSQL Database, the function seems to return nothing but an empty string. As a result, whenever I check my php myadmin, nothing appears on the "title" column. Can anyone please tell me what I can do to make this work? Thank you!

Answer 1

I suggest simplifying it by doing this (remove the comments as it is too much info):
<?PHP
# Get the HTML from a web page
$html = file_get_contents("http://whatever.url");
# Get all HTML titles in to an array (this is your own code)
$res = preg_match("/<title>(.*)<\/title>/siU", $html, $titleArray);
# Get the first array entry - and an empty string if the tag does not exists
$title = isset($titleArray[0]) ? $titleArray[0] : "";
# Remove HTML tags from the string
$title = strip_tags($title);
# Show the title - convert HTML tags just to show it does not have any
echo "[". htmlentities($title) ."]";
# Save it to your database ...
?>