Error Notice: Trying to get Property of non-object when picking the page title

Question

I have a code that should take the title of the page example "Facebook - sign in or register" only that is giving error in this line

$title = $dom->getElementsByTagName('title')->item('0')->nodeValue;

that is the code:

function website_title($urli) {
   $ch = curl_init();
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $urli);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
// define um usuário agente.
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/27.0.1453.94 Safari/537.36');
   $html = curl_exec($ch);
   curl_close($ch);

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

   $title = $dom->getElementsByTagName('title')->item('0')->nodeValue;
   return $title;
}

echo website_title('https://www.facebook.com/');

if anyone can help me I’m grateful.

Answer 1

You have some errors in your code, the first of it is - Never use @ to suppress error messages, this makes your code slower and harder to debug. If you hadn’t put the @ would know the reason for your difficulty.

Second, your specific problem is the following: You are not passing to the method loadHTML() no value, basically its variable $html this empty. This happened for a reason, your Curl code did not take into account that Facebook uses https and so the Curl request failed, triggering the whole problem. The code below shows a working version of your code.

<?php

function website_title($urli) {
   $ch = curl_init();
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $urli);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
// define um usuário agente.
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/27.0.1453.94 Safari/537.36');
   $html = curl_exec($ch);
   curl_close($ch);

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


   $title = $dom->getElementsByTagName('title')->item('0')->nodeValue;
   return $title;
}

echo website_title('https://www.facebook.com/');

I already made a library to make it easier to use Curl, it is very simple, but it can help you .