There are many ways of extracting an image from content with php, but recently I was working on a project and I wanted an easy way to extract without too much work, too much coding, that is.
The idea was to access a database and display content in excerpt form with 100px by 75px thumbnail images extracted from the content. We will use the while loop to display to display a number of articles
// first connect to database
// then run mysql_query
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM table");
if (!$result) {
exit ('Error fethcing member details: ' . mysql_error(). '');
}
// run while loop
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
$title = $row ['title'];
$link = $row ['link'];
$html = $body;
// clean text to have neatly displayed content
$body = strip_tags(trim($body));
<strong>// get image from content by performing a regular expression</strong>
<pre>if (stripos($html, '<img') !== false) {
preg_match('/<img[^>]+>/i',$html, $matches);</pre>
foreach ($matches as $var){
echo $var;
}
} else {
// else echo an alternative image, so an image is always displayed if the article does not have one
echo '<a href="'.$url.'.html"><img src="alternate_image.jpg" alt="" /></a>';
}
// finish getting image
// display title
echo $title';
// display body as excerpt with only 450 characters
echo ''.substr($body, 0, strpos("$body", " ", "450")).'...';
// div with clear for neat display of content
echo '';
}
