PHP tip: How to get a web page using the fopen wrappers
PHP’s fopen wrappers enable the standard file functions to read web pages from a web server. A few additional calls are needed to set parameters for a web server request and to get the server’s HTTP...
View ArticlePHP tip: How to get a web page using CURL
The first step when building a PHP search engine, link checker, or keyword extractor is to get the web page from the web server. There are several ways to do this. From PHP 4 onwards, the most flexible...
View ArticlePHP tip: How to get a web page content type
A web page’s content type tells you the page's MIME type (such as “text/html” or “image/png”) and the character set used by page text. You'll need the character set to interpret the page's characters...
View ArticlePHP tip: How to extract URLs from a web page
URL extraction is at the core of link checkers, search engine spiders, and a variety of web page analysis tools. While <a> and <img> elements are primary sources of URLs, there are more...
View ArticlePHP tip: How to extract URLs from a CSS file
Though HTML is usually the focus for extracting URLs for a link checker or analysis tool, CSS files also include URLs. The CSS @import rule uses a URL to include another CSS file, and many style...
View ArticlePHP tip: How to extract keywords from a web page
Web page keywords characterize the page's topic for a search engine. Extracting keywords requires that you recognize the page's character encoding, strip away HTML tags, scripts, and styles, decode...
View ArticlePHP tip: How to decode HTML entities on a web page
HTML entities encode special characters and symbols, such as € for €, or © for ©. When building a PHP search engine or web page analysis tool, HTML entities within a page must be...
View ArticlePHP tip: How to convert a relative URL to an absolute URL
An absolute URL is complete and ready to use to download a web file. But web pages often include incomplete relative URLs with missing parts, such as an "http" or host name, or the first part of a...
View ArticleJava tip: How to parse integers quickly
Java has several ways to parse integers from strings. Performance differences between these methods can be significant when parsing a large number of integers. Doing your own integer parsing can...
View ArticleJava tip: How to get a web page
The starting point for building a link checker, web spider, or web page analyzer is, of course, to get the web page from the web server. Java's java.net package includes classes to manage URLs and to...
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