QueryPath can be used to crawl the web, parsing web pages and gleaning information. But the HTML of remote websites is not always as pristine and standards compliant as we would like, and one thing that can be particularly frustrating is determining the encoding of a document. (This gets substantially more complicated when HTTP headers list one encoding and HTML meta tags list another -- a common configuration error).

QueryPath is primarily a library for working with XML and HTML, but it assumes that you know from the outset what character set your document uses. This is not always a good assumption to make. Here is one way to circumvent the problem: Rather than write code to find out a document's character set, use PHP built-in functions (assuming you have the MB library compiled in) to do this for you.

<?php
require 'QueryPath/QueryPath.php';
 
$url = 'http://mopy.fr/';
$contents = mb_convert_encoding(file_get_contents($url), 'iso-8859-1', 'auto');
$opts = array('ignore_parser_warnings' => TRUE);
 
print @qp($contents, 'title', $opts)->text() . PHP_EOL;