Use PHP to Retrieve All Links on a Page

I was developing a project recently, where I had the need to get all the links on a certain page. I first turned to a JavaScript library, like Jasmine.

I really wanted to do this within my PHP code, so I ended up going with this solution:

$html = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com');

$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($html);

// grab all the on the page
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$hrefs = $xpath->evaluate("/html/body//a");

for ($i = 0; $i < $hrefs->length; $i++) {
    $href = $hrefs->item($i);
    $url = $href->getAttribute('href');
    echo $url;
}

Originally published at Chris Blackwell’s Domain.