Can You Delete Elements in a Loaded DOMDocument Without Creating a New One?

Deleting Elements with DOMDocument

Manipulating HTML documents is a common task for web developers. In PHP, the DOMDocument class provides a convenient way to parse and manipulate HTML code. While it's possible to create a new DOMDocument from scratch, in many cases it's more efficient to load an existing document into a DOMDocument object.

One of the most common operations when modifying an HTML document is removing elements. Let's consider the following HTML code:

<code class="html"><p><a href="#">First</a></p>
<p><a href="#">Second</a></p>
<p><a href="#">Third</a></p></code>

Q: Is it possible to delete an element in a loaded DOMDocument without creating a new one?

<code class="php">$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'utf-8');
$dom->loadHTML($html);

foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('a') as $href) {
    if ($href->nodeValue == 'First')
        // delete
}</code>

A: Yes, it is possible to delete an element from a loaded DOMDocument without creating a new one:

<code class="php">$href->parentNode->removeChild($href);</code>

This approach modifies the original DOMDocument object directly. The DOMNode::$parentNode property references the parent node of the current node, and the DOMNode::removeChild() method removes the specified child node from the parent node.

Additional resources for working with DOMDocuments:

• [DOMNode::$parentNode Documentation](https://www.php.net/manual/en/domnode.parentnode.php)
• [DOMNode::removeChild() Documentation](https://www.php.net/manual/en/domnode.removechild.php)
• How to remove attributes using PHP DOMDocument?
• How to remove an HTML element using the DOMDocument class

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