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How to Efficiently Extract Text from Specific HTML Elements Using PHP\'s DOMDocument and XPath?

Barbara Streisand
Barbara StreisandOriginal
2024-11-02 08:48:29440browse

How to Efficiently Extract Text from Specific HTML Elements Using PHP's DOMDocument and XPath?

Parsing HTML with PHP's HTML DOMDocument

Question:

Utilizing the DOMDocument object, capture text within specific HTML elements. For example, extracting "Capture this text 1" and "Capture this text 2" from the following 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>

Answer:

Using DOMDocument::getElementsByTagName to retrieve all tags with a specific name may prove inefficient for this task. Instead, consider employing an XPath query on the document, leveraging the DOMXPath class.

Implementation:

  1. Load HTML into a DOMDocument Object:

    <code class="php">$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);</code>
  2. Instantiate DOMXPath Object:

    <code class="php">$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);</code>
  3. Execute XPath Query:

    <code class="php">$tags = $xpath->query('//div[@class="main"]/div[@class="text"]');</code>
  4. Retrieve Text Values:

    <code class="php">foreach ($tags as $tag) {
     var_dump(trim($tag->nodeValue));
    }</code>

This approach effectively extracts "Capture this text 1" and "Capture this text 2" from the provided HTML.

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