How to Get the Text from a Web Page in PHP

To get text from a web page, we just need to retrieve the HTML contents and extract text enclosed within HTML elements.

Writing PHP code from scratch to pull that off can be a bit time consuming — but thankfully, we don’t have to write any new code at all.

We can use the below ready-to-run PHP code examples to call a free API that performs the entire process for us.

To begin, let’s install the client SDK. We can install using Composer by running the below command from the command line:

composer require cloudmersive/cloudmersive_document_convert_api_client

Next, let’s grab a free Cloudmersive API key to authorize our requests — this will allow a limit of 800 API calls per month (with no commitments; the total resets the following month once we reach it).

Then, let’s structure the input request that’ll capture our webpage URL. We can follow the JSON example below:

{
  "Url": "string"
}

Finally, let’s copy the below code to call the function. Let’s paste our API key where indicated in the $config snippet and pass through our input request parameter:

<?php
require_once(__DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php');

// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
$config = Swagger\Client\Configuration::getDefaultConfiguration()->setApiKey('Apikey', 'YOUR_API_KEY');



$apiInstance = new Swagger\Client\Api\ConvertWebApi(
    
    
    new GuzzleHttp\Client(),
    $config
);
$input = new \Swagger\Client\Model\UrlToTextRequest(); // \Swagger\Client\Model\UrlToTextRequest | HTML to Text request parameters

try {
    $result = $apiInstance->convertWebUrlToTxt($input);
    print_r($result);
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo 'Exception when calling ConvertWebApi->convertWebUrlToTxt: ', $e->getMessage(), PHP_EOL;
}
?>

The operation will return a text string containing all the text contents from the webpage URL.

No more code required!