How to remove an HTML element using the DOMDocument class

Question

Is there a way to remove a HTML element by using the DOMDocument class?

Answer 1

In addition to Dave Morgan's answer you can use DOMNode::removeChild to remove child from list of children:

Removing a child by tag name

//The following example will delete the table element of an HTML content.

$dom = new DOMDocument();

//avoid the whitespace after removing the node
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;

//parse html dom elements
$dom->loadHTML($html_contents);

//get the table from dom
if($table = $dom->getElementsByTagName('table')->item(0)) {

   //remove the node by telling the parent node to remove the child
   $table->parentNode->removeChild($table);

   //save the new document
   echo $dom->saveHTML();

}

Removing a child by class name

//same beginning
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$dom->loadHTML($html_contents);

//use DomXPath to find the table element with your class name
$xpath = new DomXPath($dom);
$classname='MyTableName';
$xpath_results = $xpath->query("//table[contains(@class, '$classname')]");

//get the first table from XPath results
if($table = $xpath_results->item(0)){

    //remove the node the same way
    $table ->parentNode->removeChild($table);

    echo $dom->saveHTML();
}   

Resources

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/domnode.removechild.php

How to delete element with DOMDocument?

How to get full HTML from DOMXPath::query() method?