Which PHP XML and HTML Parsing Method Suits Your Needs Best?

Parsing and Processing HTML/XML in PHP

Native XML Extensions

DOM

DOM offers the most control and provides an extensive API for manipulating XML documents. It's robust and supports XPath queries.

XMLReader

XMLReader is a pull parser that iterates through an XML document, providing access to each node. It's faster than DOM but may have limitations when parsing broken HTML.

XML Parser

This extension creates XML parsers with configurable parameters. It implements a SAX-style push parser and is often used for memory management.

SimpleXML

SimpleXML simplifies XML processing by converting it into an object that can be accessed with object properties and array iterators. However, it's limited to parsing valid XHTML.

3rd Party Libraries (libxml based)

FluentDom

A jQuery-like interface for DOMDocument, providing a fluent API for manipulating XML. It supports XPath and CSS selectors.

HtmlPageDom

A library for manipulating HTML documents using DOM, with methods specifically designed for HTML.

phpQuery

A jQuery-inspired library for DOM manipulation, designed to mirror the JavaScript library.

3rd-Party (not libxml-based)

PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

Supports invalid HTML and allows jQuery-like selectors, but it's slow and memory-hungry.

PHP Html Parser

Offers CSS selector support and allows scraping invalid HTML, but it has performance and memory issues.

HTML 5

HTML5DomDocument

Extends the DOMDocument library, fixing bugs and adding new functionality for parsing HTML5. Supports CSS selectors.

HTML5

A dedicated HTML5 parser and writer, offering composer support, event-based parsing, and a DOM tree builder.

Regular Expressions

Regular expressions are discouraged for parsing HTML due to their brittleness and limitations.

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