PHP - getting a site's favicon and converting it to png if necessary

Question

Hi

For any given site "example.domain.tld" or merely "domain.tld" I need to do the following in PHP:

• If the site has a favicon, get it wherever it is
  • If it is not already a PNG, convert it to PNG
  • Save it to /favicons/example.domain.tld.png
• If the site has no favicon, do nothing.

Any ideas? I'm being stumped by the unreliable fileformat and location of the favicons, but if at all possible I want to avoid downloading the entire source of the page with file_get_contents in order to find it in the headers. Also converting to png seems nontrivial.

Thanks,

Mala

Answer 1

If the favicon isn't located at /favicon.ico I guess you have to parse the HTML.

For the filetype detection, you can use this extension, which detects the filetype by using magic bytes.

You can convert to PNG by using the GD library, an example can be found here.

Answer 2

Coverting to PNG is not that hard.

I don't get the question entirely, is this fav icon on your site or on other sites? If on other sites, you will have to parse fetched HTML and then somehow load favicon.

Answer 3

If your PHP install includes the GD library, you can convert an image to a PNG using the imagepng function.

Answer 4

As is typical, I found a passable solution shortly after asking the question - let google do the work for you:

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=URL

returns a 16x16 png

Answer 5

i'm equally confused on this issue. It'll be fun if we had a nice helpout :)

Answer 6

Found this: http://www.controlstyle.com/articles/programming/text/php-favicon/

I'm about to try it for my project and I'll report back and tell you if it works!

Cheers

Iain