PHP DOMDocument - trouble accessing list index - php

Question

I am writing some code for an IRC bot written in php and running on the linux cli. I'm having a little trouble with my code to retrieve a websites title tag and display it using DOMDocument NodeList. Basically, on websites with two or more tags (and you would be surprised how many there actually are...) I want to process for only the first title tag. As you can see from the code below (which is working fine for processing one, or more tags) there is a foreach block where it iterates through each title tag.
public function onReceivedData($data) {
// loop through each message token
foreach ($data["message"] as $token) {
// if the token starts with www, add http file handle
if (strcmp(substr($token, 0, 4), "www.") == 0) {
$token = "http://" . $token;
}
// validate token as a URL
if (filter_var($token, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL)) {
// create timeout stream context
$theContext['http']['timeout'] = 3;
$context = stream_context_create($theContext);
// get contents of url
if ($file = file_get_contents($token, false, $context)) {
// instantiate a new DOMDocument object
$dom = new DOMDocument;
// load the html into the DOMDocument obj
#$dom->loadHTML($file);
// retrieve the title from the DOM node
// if assignment is valid then...
if ($title = $dom->getElementsByTagName("title")) {
// send a message to the channel
foreach ($title as $theTitle) {
$this->privmsg($data["target"], $theTitle->nodeValue);
}
}
} else {
// notify of failure
$this->privmsg($data["target"], "Site could not be reached");
}
}
}
}
What I'd prefer, is to somehow limit it to only processing the first title tag. I'm aware that I can just wrap an if statement around it with a variable so it only echos one time, but I'm more looking at using a "for" statement to process a single iteration. However, when I do this, I can't access the title attribute with $title->nodeValue; it says it's undefined, and only when i use the foreach $title as $theTitle can I access the values. I've tried $title[0]->nodeValue and $title->nodeValue(0) to retrieve the first title from the list, but unfortunately to no avail. A bit stumped and a quick google didn't turn up a lot.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Cheers, and I'll keep looking too.

Answer 1

You can solve this with XPath:
$dom = new DOMDocument();
#$dom->loadHTML($file);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$title = $xpath->query('//title')->item(0)->nodeValue;

Answer 2

Try something like this:
$title->item(0)->nodeValue;
http://www.php.net/manual/en/class.domnodelist.php