How to extract images from an URL in PHP

Posted on August 30, 2008, under PHP, Bookmark it

Here’s a piece of code that extracts images from an URL. This only works if the images are displayed using the IMG tag (not CSS).

This script only shows images. It doesn’t download any. The src attribute must have a full url in order for the images to show.

<?php
/*
Credits: Bit Repository
URL: http://www.bitrepository.com/
*/

$url = 'http://www.microsoft.com/';

// Fetch page
$string = FetchPage($url);

// Regex that extracts the images (full tag)
$image_regex_src_url = '/<img[^>]*'.

'src=[\"|\'](.*)[\"|\']/Ui';

preg_match_all($image_regex, $string, $out, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

$img_tag_array = $out[0];

echo "<pre>"; print_r($img_tag_array); echo "</pre>";

// Regex for SRC Value
$image_regex_src_url = '/<img[^>]*'.

'src=[\"|\'](.*)[\"|\']/Ui';

preg_match_all($image_regex_src_url, $string, $out, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

$images_url_array = $out[1];

echo "<pre>"; print_r($images_url_array); echo "</pre>";

// Fetch Page Function

function FetchPage($path)
{
$file = fopen($path, "r"); 

if (!$file)
{
exit("The was a connection error!");
} 

$data = '';

while (!feof($file))
{
// Extract the data from the file / url

$data .= fgets($file, 1024);
}
return $data;
}
?>

NOTE: You can use this script to extract images from local files too (not necessarily URLs).

Feel free to post any comments or suggestions regarding this script.

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August 30, 2008
article by Gabriel C.
8 comments

Tags: extract

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8 Replies to "How to extract images from an URL in PHP"

jay
December 7, 2009 at 6:54 PM

Reply

Hi there thanks for the tutorial – only one problem though, this element on line 17

preg_match_all($image_regex, $string, $out, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

is not functioning properly so I removed it outright. was returning:

Warning: preg_match_all() [function.preg-match-all]: Empty regular expression in /home/example/public_html/example/test-script.php on line 17

seems to work fine without it.
Ty
April 12, 2010 at 8:04 AM

Reply

did you remove the WHOLE LINE where “PREG_PATTERN_ORDER” or just the word “PREG_PATTERN_ORDER” and the comma “,” (on both lines? or just line 17)
thank you.
1. Gabriel C.
  April 12, 2010 at 8:55 AM
  
  Reply
  
  I haven’t removed “PREG_PATTERN_ORDER”. What doesn’t fit in the code box is moved to the next line. As you can see the line 17 is actually made from 2 lines.
Ty
April 13, 2010 at 1:17 AM

Reply

Hi Gabriel, I tried it but it doesn’t work.. I saw that JAY has indicated the same problem and getting the code to work once he removed the certain parts.. so i was asking him which part exactly he removed to get the code working.. thank you..
Can Sinan ARTUÇ
May 30, 2010 at 12:46 PM

Reply

Hi,

Remove the following lines, it will work properly without any warnings and notices:

preg_match_all($image_regex, $string, $out, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

$img_tag_array = $out[0];

echo "<pre>"; print_r($img_tag_array); echo "</pre>";
narinder singh
November 11, 2010 at 3:16 AM

Reply

Hi Gabriel,
Thank you very much for this valueable post. I have used this code and its perfectly working. but when I try to fetch images from http://www.asos.com/ then it craashing complete code. Its perfectly working on Localhost but when I am trying to upload this on sesrver its genrating warning messages
“Warning: file_get_contents(http://www.asos.com/) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request in C:\Inetpub\vhosts\allsii.com\httpdocs\dctest9\products1.php on line 39″

Can you please help me for this ?
Narinder.
Beegee
January 5, 2011 at 9:14 PM

Reply

Interesting this script… But can anyone tell me how to display images instead of displaying the urls? I am creating a script that can fetch all images that are displayed on a certain url.
Eflam
January 30, 2011 at 2:12 PM

Reply

$image_regex is supposed to be $image_regex_src_url. That will give you an array of images. This is awesome. Thank you!

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How to extract images from an URL in PHP

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8 Replies to "How to extract images from an URL in PHP"

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