Web page keywords characterize the page's topic for a search engine. Extracting keywords requires that you recognize the page's character encoding, strip away HTML tags, scripts, and styles, decode HTML entities, and remove unwanted punctuation, symbols, numbers, and stop words. This article shows how.

The HTML tags on a web page must be stripped away to get clean text for a PHP search engine, keyword extractor, or some other page analysis tool. PHP's standard strip_tags( ) function will do part of the job, but you need to strip out styles, scripts, embedded objects, and other unwanted page code first. This tip shows how.

The first step when building a PHP search engine, link checker, or keyword extractor is to get the web page from the web server. There are several ways to do this. From PHP 4 onwards, the most flexible way uses PHP’s CURL (Client URL) functions. This tip shows how.