Parse HTML with PHP's HTML DOMDocument
I was trying to do it with "getElementsByTagName", but it wasn't working, I'm new to using DOMDocument to parse HTML, as I used to use regex until yesterday some kind fokes here told me that DOMEDocument would be better for the job, so I'm giving it a try :)
I google around for a while looking for some explains but didn't find anything that helped (not with the class anyway)
So I want to capture "Capture this text 1" and "Capture this text 2" and so on.
Doesn't look to hard, but I can't figure it out :(
<div class="main">
<div class="text">
Capture this text 1
</div>
</div>
<div class="main">
<div class="text">
Capture this text 2
</div>
</div>
Answer
If you want to get :
- The text
- that's inside a
<div>tag withclass="text" - that's, itself, inside a
<div>withclass="main"
I would say the easiest way is not to use DOMDocument::getElementsByTagName -- which will return all tags that have a specific name (while you only want some of them).
Instead, I would use an XPath query on your document, using the DOMXpath class.
For example, something like this should do, to load the HTML string into a DOM object, and instance the DOMXpath class :
$html = <<<HTML
<div class="main">
<div class="text">
Capture this text 1
</div>
</div>
<div class="main">
<div class="text">
Capture this text 2
</div>
</div>
HTML;
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
And, then, you can use XPath queries, with the DOMXPath::query method, that returns the list of elements you were searching for :
$tags = $xpath->query('//div[@class="main"]/div[@class="text"]');
foreach ($tags as $tag) {
var_dump(trim($tag->nodeValue));
}
And executing this gives me the following output :
string 'Capture this text 1' (length=19)
string 'Capture this text 2' (length=19)