Get post title of faulty link on 404 error page

Question

My users can link to things that don't exist on the page. That's something I chose because it is the best option for my concept. Anyway, what I want to do is this... Let's say I clicked on a link that should link to the post "Hello World", but as said, this post does not exist...

What I want to do is show this post_title (Hello World) on the 404 Error page and make suggestions as context related posts. The related posts part is not a problem, but how do I get the clicked link / post title on the 404 page?

Answer 1

As @krzysiek wrote, it's not possible.

Simply put, you can't get the title of something that doesn't exists.

However, you may try to guess the title from the url. Below is an excerpt from a code I wrote that works for both 404 and search pages (that's why I also check for the

$search_term = substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 1);
$search_term = urldecode(stripslashes($search_term));
$search_term = rtrim($search_term, "/");

$find = array("'.html'", "'.+/'", "'[-/_]'");
$replace = " ";
$search_term = trim(preg_replace($find, $replace, $search_term));
$search_term = str_replace("%20", $replace, $search_term);
$search_term = preg_replace('!\s+!', ' ', $search_term);

Here you can use $search_term as a guessed title.

You can use this string to search suggestions with something like that (better if you use some plugin such relevanssi to improve searches):

if (trim($search_term) == '') $search_term = get_search_query();

if (trim($search_term) == '') return false;

$s = str_replace("-", " ", $search_term);

$search_terms = explode(' ', $s);

$query = new WP_Query(array('post_type' => 'any', 's' => $s));
$posts = $query->posts;
if (count($posts) == 0) {
    $query = new WP_Query(array(array('post_type' => 'any', 'name' => $search_term)));
    $posts = $query->posts;
}
//... handle your results

You can even further improve this looking of occurrences of each word in post type names, taxonomies, etc, and providing links to correspondent archive pages (using, for instance, all items in $search_terms).

Keep this code as an example, as it is the short version of a more complex function I use to handle 404 and search results.

Answer 2

I'm afraid it's not possible.

You are unable to check what was the link title, that user clicked. The only information you can get, is the URL (href attribute) it was pointing to (but it's different than the title of that link).