The best way to get contents from web page would be cURL library. It is much easier compared to file_get_contents.

Using curl is a good way to go, on the other way round, you can still use file_get_contents to get the content of the page, use strip_tags to extract only text from html and then use script to get the first 200 characters.

This is a quick hack, but it won't work when the content is generated via javascript.
$url='http://www.youtube.com/';
$content=substr(strip_tags(preg_replace('#<(((no)? script)|style)(.*?)>(.*?)</\1>#is','',file_get_contents($url))),0,200);
echo $content;

The best option is to install these packages on your server: phantomjs casperjs slimerjs and use one of the composer packages: microweber/screen phpcasperjs/phpcasperjs to control them.

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