For this weeks Thursday Code Tip I will show how to use PHP to crawl a website to gather content. First we start by selecting the URL to crawl:

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$sURL = "http://www.defvayne23.com/";

Next we get the content of the page:

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$sContent = file_get_contents($sURL);

Now to use REGEX to get what we want. You can learn patterns here. Below we search for the text within a H1 tag.

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$sPattern = '/<h1>([a-z0-9\s]+)<\/h1>/i';
preg_match($sPattern, $sContent, $aMatches);

The above won’t return anything because I link all my H1′s. So lets modify it so it will account for the links, but not gather them.

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$sPattern = '/<h1><a [^>]+>([a-z0-9\s]+)<\/a><\/h1>/i';

Now that we account for the anchor the above should return:

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Array
(
    [0] => Defvayne23
    [1] => Defvayne23
)

The first part of the array is the HTML it found including the h1 and anchor. The second is just the text that we where looking for.

Here it is all together:

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$sURL = "http://www.defvayne23.com/";
$sContent = file_get_contents($sURL);
$sPattern = '/<h1><a [^>]+>([a-z0-9\s]+)<\/a><\/h1>/i';
preg_match($sPattern, $sContent, $aMatches);
$sHeader = $aMatches[1];

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// Pass the file path and option to cache the image to the class
$oImage = new makeImage($sFile, true);
// Tell the object to resize the image, no need to pass the image
$oImage->resize(200, 100);
// Now crop the image after it was resized
$oImage->crop(100, 100, 0, 0);
// Now send the image data to the user
$oImage->draw(null, 100);

Class handled all the dirty work of keeping up with the image, and knowing all the info about the image. Above code is easier to maintain then doing all the code straight in the file. Class used above is available here.