Getting An Excerpt From Html In Php

I need to get a short excerpt of news items written in HTML to show on my front page. Obviously I can't use something as simple as substr because it might leave tags unclosed or ev

Solution 1:

Simplest way is to strip all HTML from the item text using strip_tags() before truncating it.

Solution 2:

I would take the 2nd option if it's important to retain the HTML structure of the original news item.

A simple way to implement this would be to run your fragment through Tidy to close off any unclosed tags. In particular, see the tidy::cleanRepair method.

Solution 3:

Hello I guess what you are looking for is called website scraping. Here is how you can scrape a website; Use a library PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser download here PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

And finally here is the code how you can scrape Slashdot

// Create DOM from URL$html = file_get_html('http://slashdot.org/');

// Find all article blocksforeach($html->find('div.article') as$article) {
    $item['title']   = $article->find('div.title', 0)->plaintext;
    $item['intro']   = $article->find('div.intro', 0)->plaintext;
    $item['details'] = $article->find('div.details', 0)->plaintext;
    $articles[] = $item;
}

print_r($articles); 

Solution 4:

You could try parsing your data to XML and then truncating only the "pure" text nodes.

Note: This solution forces the input to be valid XML and to be always in about the same structure.

Solution 5:

This excerpts down to the first paragraph without cutting words and appends optional trail.

$excerpt = self::excerpt_paragraph($html, 180)

/**
* excerpt first paragraph from html content
* 
**/publicstaticfunctionexcerpt_paragraph($html, $max_char = 100, $trail='...')
{
    // temp var to capture the p tag(s)$matches= array();
    if ( preg_match( '/<p>[^>]+<\/p>/', $html, $matches) )
    {
        // found <p></p>$p = strip_tags($matches[0]);
    } else {
        $p = strip_tags($html);
    }
    //shorten without cutting words$p = self::short_str($p, $max_char );

    // remove trailing comma, full stop, colon, semicolon, 'a', 'A', space$p = rtrim($p, ',.;: aA' );

    // return nothing if just spaces or too shortif (ctype_space($p) || $p=='' || strlen($p)<10) { return''; }

    return'<p>'.$p.$trail.'</p>';
}
///**
* shorten string but not cut words
* 
**/publicstaticfunctionshort_str($str, $len, $cut = false)
{
    if ( strlen( $str ) <= $len ) { return$str; }
    $string = ( $cut ? substr( $str, 0, $len ) : substr( $str, 0, strrpos( substr( $str, 0, $len ), ' ' ) ) );
    return$string;
}
//