Create an excerpt using the first paragraph <p> with PHP

The PHP snippet below scrapes the current URL to extract the first paragraph on the page. They can be useful for creating excerpts and creating dynamic meta descriptions.

<?php
// load the URL
$url = https://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
// Get current URL contents
$content = file_get_contents($url);

// load the content
$dom = new domdocument();
$dom->loadhtml($content);

// output first paragraph
$firstpara = $dom->getElementsByTagName('p');
echo " {$firstpara->item(0)->nodeValue}\n";

?>