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How can DOMDocument and XPath be used to Target and Extract Specific Text Content from HTML?
- Mary-Kate OlsenOriginal
- 2024-10-30 09:51:27900browse
DOMDocument Parsing for Targeting Specific Content
Using "DOMDocument", a powerful PHP library, allows for precise parsing of HTML documents. Unlike "getElementsByTagName", which retrieves all tags with a specific name, this method utilizes XPath queries to effectively target desired elements.
Capture Text Nodes within Specific Contexts
To extract specific text content, the process involves:
- Loading the HTML string into a DOM object using "DOMDocument::loadHTML".
- Initiating an "XPath" object using "new DOMXPath($dom)".
- Employing an XPath query which specifies the target nodes. For instance:
$tags = $xpath->query('//div[@class="main"]/div[@class="text"]');
This query retrieves all
Iterating through the resulting list of elements using a "foreach" loop allows for the extraction of "nodeValue", which contains the actual text:
foreach ($tags as $tag) {
var_dump(trim($tag->nodeValue));
}
Example Implementation
Consider the following HTML snippet:
<code class="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></code>
Using the provided query, the output would be:
string 'Capture this text 1' (length=19) string 'Capture this text 2' (length=19)
This demonstrates the ability to precisely extract specific text content within a hierarchical HTML structure using "DOMDocument" and XPath.
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