How to get a node by its url alias?

Question

I know I can load a node by its title with the node_load() function. Is it possible to load a node by its URL alias?

Answer 1

You want to investigate menu_get_object and drupal_lookup_path.

Something like this would do what you want:

$alias = "some/path/to/a/page";
$path = drupal_lookup_path("source", $alias);
$node = menu_get_object("node", 1, $path);

Answer 2

For somebody looking to find how to do this in Drupal 8 here is the corresponding question and answer

How can I get the node ID from a path alias?

use \Drupal\Core\Url;

$alias = \Drupal::service('path.alias_manager')->getPathByAlias('/etapes-de-la-vie');
$params = Url::fromUri("internal:" . $alias)->getRouteParameters();
$entity_type = key($params);
$node = \Drupal::entityTypeManager()->getStorage($entity_type)->load($params[$entity_type]);

For Drupal 9 use \Drupal::service('path_alias.manager') instead of \Drupal::service('path.alias_manager')