note 76297 deleted from function.preg-replace by cmb

Note Submitter: mtsoft at mt-soft dot com dot ar ---- This function takes a URL and returns a plain-text version of the page. It uses cURL to retrieve the page and a combination of regular expressions to strip all unwanted whitespace. This function will even strip the text from STYLE and SCRIPT tags, which are ignored by PHP functions such as strip_tags (they strip only the tags, leaving the text in the middle intact). Regular expressions were split in 2 stages, to avoid deleting single carriage returns (also matched by \s) but still delete all blank lines and multiple linefeeds or spaces, trimming operations took place in 2 stages. <?php function webpage2txt($url) { $user_agent = “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)”; $ch = curl_init(); // initialize curl handle curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); // set url to post to curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1); // Fail on errors curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); // allow redirects curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1); // return into a variable curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PORT, 80); //Set the port number curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15); // times out after 15s curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent); $document = curl_exec($ch); $search = array(’@<script[^>]*?>.*?</script>@si’, // Strip out javascript ‘@<style[^>]*?>.*?</style>@siU’, // Strip style tags properly ‘@<[\/\!]*?[^<>]*?>@si’, // Strip out HTML tags ‘@<![\s\S]*?–[ \t\n\r]*>@’, // Strip multi-line comments including CDATA ‘/\s{2,}/’, ); $text = preg_replace($search, “\n”, html_entity_decode($document)); $pat[0] = “/^\s+/”; $pat[2] = “/\s+\$/”; $rep[0] = “”; $rep[2] = ” “; $text = preg_replace($pat, $rep, trim($text)); return $text; } ?> Potential uses of this function are extracting keywords from a webpage, counting words and things like that. If you find it useful, drop us a comment and let us know where you used it.