Extract content of meta element in php? [closed] - php

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I am totally new to PHP development and I would like to extract the contents of a meta tag.
I have this code that allows me to extract the contents of the element # squad.
// Pull in PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser
include("simplehtmldom/simple_html_dom.php");
// Settings on top
$sitesToCheck = array(
// id is the page ID for selector
array("url" => "http://www.arsenal.com/first-team/players", "selector" => "#squad"),
array("url" => "http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/news", "selector" => "ul[style='height:400px;']")
);
$savePath = "cachedPages/";
$emailContent = "";
// For every page to check...
foreach($sitesToCheck as $site) {
$url = $site["url"];
// Calculate the cachedPage name, set oldContent = "";
$fileName = md5($url);
$oldContent = "";
// Get the URL's current page content
$html = file_get_html($url);
// Find content by querying with a selector, just like a selector engine!
foreach($html->find($site["selector"]) as $element) {
$currentContent = $element->plaintext;;
}
// If a cached file exists
if(file_exists($savePath.$fileName)) {
// Retrieve the old content
$oldContent = file_get_contents($savePath.$fileName);
}
// If different, notify!
if($oldContent && $currentContent != $oldContent) {
// Build simple email content
$emailContent = "Hey, the following page has changed!\n\n".$url."\n\n";
}
// Save new content
file_put_contents($savePath.$fileName,$currentContent);
}
// Send the email if there's content!
if($emailContent) {
// Sendmail!
mail("me#myself.name","Sites Have Changed!",$emailContent,"From: alerts#myself.name","\r\n");
// Debug
echo $emailContent;
}
But I want to change this code to get the number of comments in income.
Here is the meta tag where i would just extract the number of comments :
<meta item="desc" content="Comments:645">
Am I clear enough, do you understand me?
If I am not explicit enough, ask me?
Thanks for help

Answer 1

There's two ways to do this. You could either use the native PHP function: get_meta_tags() like so:
$tags = get_meta_tags('http://yoursite.com');
$comments = $tags['desc'];
Or you could use RegEx, but the above would be much more practical.

Answer 2

What you are looking for might be screen scraping.
This is the process where a programming-language like php, python or ruby loads a website in memory and uses various selectors to grab content from it.
Screen scraping is mostly used on websites that feature a lot of interesting data but have no json or xml API's
having googled around for it I stumbled on this post:
PHP equivalent of PyQuery or Nokogiri?
This article explains more about screen-scraping for web:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

Answer 3

Look for use domDocument
$dom = new domDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($htmlPage);
$metas = $dom->documentElement->getElementsByTagName('meta');
$ar = array();
foreach ($metas as $meta) {
$name = $meta->getAttribute('name');
$value = $meta->getAttribute('content');
$ar[$name] = $value;
}
print_r($ar); // print array meta-values