I'm using PHP's DOMDocument to parse and normalize user-submitted HTML using the loadHTML
method to parse the content then getting a well-formed result via saveHTML
:
$dom= new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML('<div><p>Hello World');
$well_formed= $dom->saveHTML();
echo($well_formed);
This does a beautiful job of parsing the fragment and adding the appropriate closing tags. The problem is that I'm also getting a bunch of tags I don't want such as <!DOCTYPE>
, <html>
, <head>
and <body>
. I understand that every well-formed HTML document needs these tags, but the HTML fragment I'm normalizing is going to be inserted into an existing valid document.
The quick solution to your problem is to use an xPath expression to grab the body.
$dom= new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML('<div><p>Hello World');
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$body = $xpath->query('/html/body');
echo($dom->saveXml($body->item(0)));
A word of warning here. Sometimes loadHTML will throw a warning when it encounters certainly poorly formed HTML documents. If you're parsing those kind of HTML documents, you'll need to find a better html parser [self link warning].