Get Text Content of current URL in php - php

I am working on URL Get content.
If i want to fetch ONLY the text conent from this site(Only text)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia
How is it possible. I can fetch the URL title and URL using PHP.
I got the url title using the below code:
$url = getenv('HTTP_REFERER');
$file = file($url);
$file = implode("",$file);
//$get_description = file_get_contents($url);
if(preg_match("/<title>(.+)<\/title>/i",$file,$m))
$get_title = $m[1];
echo $get_title;
Could you pl help me to get the content.
Using file_get_content i could get the HTML code alone. Any other possibilities?
Thanks -
Haan

If you just want to get a textual version of a HTML page, then you will have to process it yourself. Fetch the HTML (as you seem to already know how to do) and then process it into plain text with PHP.
There are several approaches to doing this. The first is htmlspecialchars() which will escape all the HTML special characters. I don't imagine this is what you actually want but I thought I'd mention it for completeness.
The second approach is strip_tags(). This will remove all HTML completely from a HTML document. However, it doesn't validate the input its working with, it just does a fairly simple text replace. This means you will end up with stuff that you might not want in the textual representation being included (such as the contents of the head section, or the innards of embedded javascript and stylesheets)
The other approach is to parse the downloaded HTML with DOMDocument. I've not written code for you (don't have time), but the general procedure would be similar to as follows:
Load the HTML into a DOMDocument object
Get the document's body element and iterate over its children.
For each child, if the child in question is a text node, append it to an output string. If it isn't a text node, then iterate over its children as well to check if any of its children are text nodes (and if not then iterate over those child elements as well and so on). You might also want to check the type of the node further. For example, if you don't want javascript or css embedded in the output then you can check that the tag type is not STYLE or SCRIPT and just ignore it if it is.
The above description is most easily implemented as a recursive function (one that calls itself).
The end result should be a string that contains only the textual content of the downloaded page, with no markup.
EDIT: Forgot about strip_tags! I updated my answer to mention that as well. I left my DOMDocument approach included in my answer though, because as the documentation for strip_tags states, it does no validation of the markup its processing, whereas DOMDocument attempts to parse it (and can potentially be more robust if a DOMDocument based text extraction is implemented well).

Use file_get_contents to get the HTML content and then strip_tags to remove the HTML tags, thus leaving only the text.

Related

Extract Table as Text Using Php

I'm looking for a simple method to get the first table of a webpage and put the whole thing into a string, that is all.
So I need to know how to use preg_match or similar to get the first instance of a table from a DOM object and get that whole thing into a string:
I have a class to download webpages as DOM but I cannot convert the html to a string as I need it..
$nodes = $this->bot->QuerySelector($this->download['DOM'], "//table[1][#class='tyebfghjftsdf-ccfkk']");
Please help
I would use Tidy to convert page to valid XHTML, then read it using XML reader (not building DOM) and start echoing data when tag is found and terminate on tag. No regular expressions involved.

Ignore html tags when loading page

Is there a simple php script ignoring html content in a database and not loading it using php?
Like: don't load images, or anchors, or elements with class=""...
Best Regards
use function strip_tag('your content here'). It will remove all HTML tags from your content and gives pure text base output.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php
I think you're looking for strip_tags(). It removes HTML tags from a text. You can also specify list of tags to keep.
Have to say, parsing text content from a HTML page requires more complex operation.
You can strip_tags()
This function tries to return a string with all NUL bytes, HTML and
PHP tags stripped from a given str. It uses the same tag stripping
state machine as the fgetss() function.

Text Search - Highlighting the Search phrase

What will be the best way to highligh the Searched pharase within a HTML Document.
I have Complete HTML Document as a Large String in a Variable.
And I want to Highlight the searched term excluding text with Tags.
For example if the user searches for "img" the img tag should be ignored but
phrase "img" within the text should be highlighted.
Don't use regex.
Because regex cannot parse HTML (or even come close), any attempt to mess around with matching words in an HTML string risks breaking words that appear in markup. A badly-implemented HTML regex hack can even leave you with HTML-injection vulnerabilities which an attacker may be able to leverage to do cross-site-scripting.
Instead you should parse the HTML and do the searches on the text content only.
If you can accept a solution that adds the highlighting from JavaScript on the client side, this is really easy because the browser will already have parsed the HTML into a bunch of DOM objects you can manipulate. See eg. this question for a client-side example.
If you have to do it with PHP that's a bit more tricky. The simple solution would be to use DOMDocument::loadHTML and then translate the findText function from the above example into PHP. At least the DOM methods used are standardised so they work the same.
Edit: This was tagged as Java before, so this answer might not be applicable.
This is quick and dirty but it might work for you, or at least be a starting point
private String highlight(String search,String html) {
return html.replaceAll("(>[^<]*)("+search+")([^>]*<)","$1<em>$2</em>$3");
}
This requires testing, and I make no guarantees that its correct but the simplest way to explain how is that you ensure that your term exists between two tags and is thus is not itself a tag or part of a tag parameter.
var highlight = function(what){
var html = document.body.innerHTML,
word = "(" + what + ")",
match = new RegExp(word, "gi");
html = html.replace(match, "<span style='background-color: red'>$1</span>");
document.body.innerHTML = html;
};
highlight('ll');
This would highlight any occurence of 'll'.
Be carefull by calling highlight() with < or > or any tag name, it would also replace those, screwing up your markup. You might workaround that by reading innerText instead of innerHTML, but that way you'll lose the markup information.
Best way probably is to implement a parser routine yourself.
Example: http://www.jsfiddle.net/DRtVn/
there is a free javascript library that might help you out -> http://scott.yang.id.au/code/se-hilite/
You must be using some server side language to render the search results on the webpage.
So the best way I can think of is to highlight the word while rendering it using the server side language itself,which may be php,java or any other language.
This way you would have only the result strings without html and without parsing overhead.

Get element content from a variable containing html

How do I use the DOM parser to extract the content of a html element in a variable.
More exactly:
I have a form where user inputs html in a text area. I want to extract the content of the first paragraph.
I know there are many tutorials on this, but could not find any on extracting from variable and not a file(page)
Thanks
If you're taking HTML as user input, I recommend using simplehtmldom. It has a loose parser with tolerance for buggy html and lets you use CSS selectors to pull element and their content out of the DOM.
I didn't test this, but it should work:
$html = str_get_html($_POST['input']);
print $html->find('p:first')->plaintext; // first paragraph

Error Tolerant HTML/XML/SGML parsing in PHP

I have a bunch of legacy documents that are HTML-like. As in, they look like HTML, but have additional made up tags that aren't a part of HTML
<strong>This is an example of a <pseud-template>fake tag</pseud-template></strong>
I need to parse these files. PHP is the only only tool available. The documents don't come close to being well formed XML.
My original thought was to use the loadHTML methods on PHPs DOMDocument. However, these methods choke on the make up HTML tags, and will refuse to parse the string/file.
$oDom = new DomDocument();
$oDom->loadHTML("<strong>This is an example of a <pseud-template>fake tag</pseud-template></strong>");
//gives us
DOMDocument::loadHTML() [function.loadHTML]: Tag pseud-template invalid in Entity, line: 1 occured in ....
The only solution I've been able to come up with is to pre-process the files with string replacement functions that will remove the invalid tags and replace them with a valid HTML tag (maybe a span with an id of the tag name).
Is there a more elegant solution? A way to let DOMDocument know about additional tags to consider as valid? Is there a different, robust HTML parsing class/object out there for PHP?
(if it's not obvious, I don't consider regular expressions a valid solution here)
Update: The information in the fake tags is part of the goal here, so something like Tidy isn't an option. Also, I'm after something that does the some level, if not all, of well-formedness cleanup for me, which is why I was looking the DomDocument's loadHTML method in the first place.
You can suppress warnings with libxml_use_internal_errors, while loading the document. Eg.:
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$doc = new DomDocument();
$doc->loadHTML("<strong>This is an example of a <pseud-template>fake tag</pseud-template></strong>");
libxml_use_internal_errors(false);
If, for some reason, you need access to the warnings, use libxml_get_errors
I wonder if passing the "bad" HTML through HTML Tidy might help as a first pass? Might be worth a look, if you can get the document to be well formed, maybe you could load it as a regular XML file with DomDocument.
#Twan
You don't need a DTD for DOMDocument to parse custom XML. Just use DOMDocument->load(), and as long as the XML is well-formed, it can read it.
Once you get the files to be well-formed, that's when you can start looking at XML parsers, before that you're S.O.L. Lok Alejo said, you could look at HTML TIDY, but it looks like that's specific to HTML, and I don't know how it would go with your custom elements.
I don't consider regular expressions a valid solution here
Until you've got well-formedness, that might be your only option. Once you get the documents to that stage, then you're in the clear with the DOM functions.
Take a look at the Parser in the PHP Fit port. The code is clean and was originally designed for loading the dirty HTML saved by Word. It's configured to pull tables out, but can easily be adapated.
You can see the source here:
http://gerd.exit0.net/pat/PHPFIT/PHPFIT-0.1.0/Parser.phps
The unit test will show you how to use it:
http://gerd.exit0.net/pat/PHPFIT/PHPFIT-0.1.0/test/parser.phps
My quick and dirty solution to this problem was to run a loop that matches my list of custom tags with a regular expression. The regexp doesn't catch tags that have another inner custom tag inside them.
When there is a match, a function to process that tag is called and returns the "processed HTML". If that custom tag was inside another custom tag than the parent becomes childless by the fact that actual HTML was inserted in place of the child, and it will be matched by the regexp and processed at the next iteration of the loop.
The loop ends when there are no childless custom tags to be matched. Overall it's iterative (a while loop) and not recursive.
#Alan Storm
Your comment on my other answer got me to thinking:
When you load an HTML file with DOMDocument, it appears to do some level of cleanup re: well well-formedness, BUT requires all your tags to be legit HTML tags. I'm looking for something that does the former, but not the later. (Alan Storm)
Run a regex (sorry!) over the tags, and when it finds one which isn't a valid HTML element, replace it with a valid element that you know doesn't exist in any of the documents (blink comes to mind...), and give it an attribute value with the name of the illegal element, so that you can switch it back afterwards. eg:
$code = str_replace("<pseudo-tag>", "<blink rel=\"pseudo-tag\">", $code);
// and then back again...
$code = preg_replace('<blink rel="(.*?)">', '<\1>', $code);
obviously that code won't work, but you get the general idea?

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