How can PHP be used to extract and display content from a website when a link is posted, similar to Facebook?

To extract and display content from a website when a link is posted, you can use PHP to fetch the HTML of the target webpage, parse it to extract relevant information (such as title, description, and image), and then display this information in a visually appealing way. This can be achieved by using PHP's cURL library to make HTTP requests to the target URL and a library like Simple HTML DOM Parser to extract specific elements from the retrieved HTML. 

<?php
// Function to fetch webpage content
function get_webpage_content($url) {
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    $output = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $output;
}

// Function to extract title from webpage content
function get_webpage_title($content) {
    preg_match('/<title>(.*?)<\/title>/', $content, $matches);
    return isset($matches[1]) ? $matches[1] : 'No title found';
}

// Function to extract description from webpage content
function get_webpage_description($content) {
    preg_match('/<meta name="description" content="(.*?)"\/>/', $content, $matches);
    return isset($matches[1]) ? $matches[1] : 'No description found';
}

// Function to extract image from webpage content
function get_webpage_image($content) {
    preg_match('/<meta property="og:image" content="(.*?)"\/>/', $content, $matches);
    return isset($matches[1]) ? $matches[1] : 'No image found';
}

// Example usage
$url = 'https://www.example.com';
$content = get_webpage_content($url);
$title = get_webpage_title($content);
$description = get_webpage_description($content);
$image = get_webpage_image($content);

echo "<h1>$title</h1>";
echo "<p>$description</p>";
echo "<img src='$image' alt='Webpage image'>";
?>

Keywords

PHP web scraping DOM parsing cURL regular expressions

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