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PHP : Function Reference : URL Functions : get_meta_tags

get_meta_tags

Extracts all meta tag content attributes from a file and returns an array (PHP 4, PHP 5)
array get_meta_tags ( string filename [, bool use_include_path] )

Example 2566. What get_meta_tags() parses

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<meta name="author" content="name">
<meta name="keywords" content="php documentation">
<meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="a php manual">
<meta name="geo.position" content="49.33;-86.59">
</head> <!-- parsing stops here -->

Example 2567. What get_meta_tags() returns

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<?php
// Assuming the above tags are at www.example.com
$tags = get_meta_tags('http://www.example.com/');

// Notice how the keys are all lowercase now, and
// how . was replaced by _ in the key.
echo $tags['author'];       // name
echo $tags['keywords'];     // php documentation
echo $tags['description'];  // a php manual
echo $tags['geo_position']; // 49.33;-86.59
?>

Code Examples / Notes » get_meta_tags

michael knapp
Tim's code is good (thanks Tim), except it won't work very well if the tag is part of a long non-breaking string.
E.g. try getting the title from Google Maps (http://www.google.com/maps).
A better solution is:
<?php
$title = "";

if ($fp = @fopen( $_POST['url'], 'r' )) {
$cont = "";

// read the contents
while( !feof( $fp ) ) {
  $buf = trim(fgets( $fp, 4096 )) ;
  $cont .= $buf;
}
// get tag contents
@preg_match( "/<title>([a-z 0-9]*)<\/title>/si", $cont, $match );

// tag contents
$title = strip_tags(@$match[ 1 ]);
}
?>
Note the strip_tags. Another thing to be careful of is to check for ", <, and >. You will need to strip those out if you are posting the output to a form.
Also, it is probably best to use the /i modifier, because some people might code <TITLE> etc...

roganty
This is a slight amendment to jimmyxx at gmail dot com function
I tried using the regex displayed in his code, and php threw up a couple of errors
Below is the correct regular expression that works
(Please note that I had to split the regex into strings because php.net was complaining about the line being to long)
<?php
preg_match_all(
  "|<meta[^>]+name=\"([^\"]*)\"[^>]" . "+content=\"([^\"]*)\"[^>]+>|i",
  $html, $out,PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
?>
The problem was due to the quotes being incorrectly escaped.
I hope this helps anyone who has been having problems with his code

bill.neumann
The get_meta_tags function does not seem to be able to grab values if there are spaces between the attribute, the equal sign, and the opening quote marks.

20-dec-2001 07:01
Tested PHP 4.0.6
get_meta_tags() seems to look only in the beginning of a file, meaning that e.g. if there is a lot of PHP code before the HTML header it will return nothing ...
Tested using get_meta_tags() on local files with about 9000 characters of PHP code before HTML HEADER.
Workaround: if possible move code after header or if not: include a file.

richard
Something that is not mentioned above and should be : When using get_meta_tags on a remote PHP page the page will be parsed before the meta tags are returned - so you can capture meta tags generated dynamically (by PHP??) on the remote end.



This DOES NOT work the same way when getting meta tags on local file systems.  Local files are not parsed through the web server before returning to get_meta_tags().  If the META tag is hard-coded into the page, you'll be fine - but if it dynamically generated you will not be able to capture it unless you use the full URL when calling your local files.

dev
Please consider that get_meta_tags and get_headers returns error when you try to connect a secure site (https) if you did'nt enable ssl support. For PHP socket functions like fsockopen, the same error occures.

rehfeld
in response to
jp at webgraphe dot com
this function grabs meta tags, not http headers
if you need the headers
<?php
$fp = fopen('http://example.org/somepage.html', 'r');
// the variable $http_response_header magically appears
print_r($http_response_header);
// or
$meta_data = stream_get_meta_data($fp);
print_r($meta_data);
?>

tim dot bennett
If you want to get the contents of tags other than meta you can use:
<?php
$page = "http://www.mysite.com/apage.php";
   // tags
   $start = '<atag>';
   $end = '<\/atag>';
   // open the file
   $fp = fopen( $page, 'r' );
   $cont = "";
   // read the contents
   while( !feof( $fp ) ) {
       $buf = trim( fgets( $fp, 4096 ) );
       $cont .= $buf;
   }
   
   // get tag contents
   preg_match( "/$start(.*)$end/s", $cont, $match );
   // tag contents
   $contents = $match[ 1 ];
?>

jp
If the URL is doing a redirection using the headers (like you would do with PHP function header("Location: URL");), the page has no content (in general). It appears get_meta_tags() doesn't catch that kind of redirection (like cURL would do) and it lead me to a timeout of my script.
I experienced this in a spider I wrote in order to feed my database of all available pages on my site and one link was linking to a page that simply has the following code:
<?php
 header("Location: sections.php?section=home");
 exit();
?>
That made my script hang for a moment and apparently, get_meta_tags() wasn't even able to return me an error.
JP.

jimmyxx
I used this as part of my mini php search based search engine - it really slowed the whole thing down. I wrote this function to read HTML (just fetch the file or use something like snoopy) and extract the meta data via a simple regex, works a treat and made my crawler much faster:
<?php
function get_meta_data($html) {
preg_match_all(
"|<meta[^>]+name=\\"([^\\"]*)\\"[^>]+content=\\"([^\\"]*)\\"[^>]+>|i",  $html, $out,PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
for ($i=0;$i < count($out[1]);$i++) {
// loop through the meta data - add your own tags here if you need
if (strtolower($out[1][$i]) == "keywords") $meta['keywords'] = $out[2][$i];
if (strtolower($out[1][$i]) == "description") $meta['description'] = $out[2][$i];
}
return $meta;
}
?>

ben dot davis
I have found that for large searches, get_meta_tags is very slow.  I created a large search engine for a website that couldnt use a database and I first tried pulling out the meta tags.  
I have found that it is actually much faster to use eregi to pull out the meta tags.  This code below pulls out the description:
if (eregi ("<meta name=\"description\" content=[^>]*", $contents, $descresult))
                               {
                                $description = explode("<meta name=\"description\" content=", $descresult[0]);
                                echo "<font face=\"Arial\" size=2>$description[1]</font>";
                               
                               }

mariano
Based on Michael Knapp's code, and adding some regex, here's a function that will get all meta tags and the title based on a URL. If there's an error, it will return false. Using the function getUrlContents(), also included, it takes care of META REFRESH re-directions, following up to the specified number of redirections. Please note that the regular expressions included were split into strings because php.net was complaining about the line being to long ;)
<?php
function getUrlData($url)
{
$result = false;

$contents = getUrlContents($url);
if (isset($contents) && is_string($contents))
{
$title = null;
$metaTags = null;

preg_match('/<title>([^>]*)<\/title>/si', $contents, $match );
if (isset($match) && is_array($match) && count($match) > 0)
{
$title = strip_tags($match[1]);
}

preg_match_all('/<[\s]*meta[\s]*name="?' . '([^>"]*)"?[\s]*' . 'content="?([^>"]*)"?[\s]*[\/]?[\s]*>/si', $contents, $match);

if (isset($match) && is_array($match) && count($match) == 3)
{
$originals = $match[0];
$names = $match[1];
$values = $match[2];

if (count($originals) == count($names) && count($names) == count($values))
{
$metaTags = array();

for ($i=0, $limiti=count($names); $i < $limiti; $i++)
{
$metaTags[$names[$i]] = array (
'html' => htmlentities($originals[$i]),
'value' => $values[$i]
);
}
}
}

$result = array (
'title' => $title,
'metaTags' => $metaTags
);
}

return $result;
}
function getUrlContents($url, $maximumRedirections = null, $currentRedirection = 0)
{
$result = false;

$contents = @file_get_contents($url);

// Check if we need to go somewhere else

if (isset($contents) && is_string($contents))
{
preg_match_all('/<[\s]*meta[\s]*http-equiv="?REFRESH"?' . '[\s]*content="?[0-9]*;[\s]*URL[\s]*=[\s]*([^>"]*)"?' . '[\s]*[\/]?[\s]*>/si', $contents, $match);

if (isset($match) && is_array($match) && count($match) == 2 && count($match[1]) == 1)
{
if (!isset($maximumRedirections) || $currentRedirection < $maximumRedirections)
{
return getUrlContents($match[1][0], $maximumRedirections, ++$currentRedirection);
}

$result = false;
}
else
{
$result = $contents;
}
}

return $contents;
}
?>
Here's an example of its usage. Check that the included URL has a META REFRESH redirection:
<?php
$result = getUrlData('http://www.marianoiglesias.com.ar/');
echo '<pre>'; print_r($result); echo '</pre>';
?>
For the above code the output would be:
<?php
Array
(
   [title] => Mariano Iglesias: El Eternauta
   [metaTags] => Array
       (
           [description] => Array
               (
                   [html] => <meta name="description" content="Java, PHP, and some other technological mumble jumble. Also, some real-life stuff as well." />
                   [value] => Java, PHP, and some other technological mumble jumble. Also, some real-life stuff as well.
               )
           [DC.title] => Array
               (
                   [html] => <meta name="DC.title" content="Mariano Iglesias - Weblog" />
                   [value] => Mariano Iglesias - Weblog
               )
           [ICBM] => Array
               (
                   [html] => <meta name="ICBM" content="-34.6017, -58.3956" />
                   [value] => -34.6017, -58.3956
               )
           [geo.position] => Array
               (
                   [html] => <meta name="geo.position" content="-34.6017;-58.3956" />
                   [value] => -34.6017;-58.3956
               )
           [geo.region] => Array
               (
                   [html] => <meta name="geo.region" content="AR-BA">
                   [value] => AR-BA
               )
           [geo.placename] => Array
               (
                   [html] => <meta name="geo.placename" content="Buenos Aires">
                   [value] => Buenos Aires
               )
       )
)
?>

richard
An Important Note about META tags and this function :  if your META tag contains newline "\n"  characters, get_meta_tags() will return a NULL value for that name property.  Removing the newlines from the source META tag corrects the problem.

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