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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:
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>
Instantiate DOMXPath Object:
<code class="php">$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);</code>
Execute XPath Query:
<code class="php">$tags = $xpath->query('//div[@class="main"]/div[@class="text"]');</code>
Retrieve Text Values:
<code class="php">foreach ($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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