CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphtmlxmlparsingdom
Stephen Smith
Stephen Smith

Reputation: 513

Extract info from html?

First of all, I've seen a good deal of similar questions. I know regex or dom can be used, but I can't find any good examples of DOM and regex makes me pull my hair. In addition, I need to pull out multiple values from the html source, some simply contents, some attributes.

Here is an example of the html I need to get info from:

<div class="log">
    <div class="message">
        <abbr class="dt" title="time string">
            DATA_1
        </abbr>
        :
        <cite class="user">
            <a class="tel" href="tel:+xxxx">
                <abbr class="fn" title="DATA_2">
                    Me
                </abbr>
            </a>
        </cite>
        :
        <q>
            DATA_3
        </q>
    </div>
</div>

The "message" block may occur once or hundreds of times. I am trying to end up with data like this:

array(4) {
    [0] => array(3) {
               ["time"] => "DATA_1"
               ["name"] => "DATA_2"
               ["message"] => "DATA_3"
           }
    [1] => array(3) {
               ["time"] => "DATA_1"
               ["name"] => "DATA_2"
               ["message"] => "DATA_3"
           }
    [2] => array(3) {
               ["time"] => "DATA_1"
               ["name"] => "DATA_2"
               ["message"] => "DATA_3"
           }
    [3] => array(3) {
               ["time"] => "DATA_1"
               ["name"] => "DATA_2"
               ["message"] => "DATA_3"
           }
}

I tried using simplexml but it only seems to work on very simple html pages. Could someone link me to some examples? I get really confused since I need to get DATA_2 from a title attribute. What do you think is the best way to extract his data? It seems very similar to XML extraction which I have done, but I need to use some other method.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 163

Answers (2)

flowfree
flowfree

Reputation: 16462

Here is an example using DOMDocument and DOMXpath to parse your HTML.

$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadHTMLFile('your_file.html');
$xpath = new DOMXpath($doc);

$res = array();

foreach ($xpath->query('//div[@class="message"]') as $elem) {
    $res[] = array(
        'time' => $xpath->query('abbr[@class="dt"]', $elem)->item(0)->nodeValue,
        'name' => $xpath->query('cite/a/abbr[@class="fn"]', $elem)->item(0)->getAttribute('title'),
        'message' => $xpath->query('q', $elem)->item(0)->nodeValue,
    );
}

Upvotes: 2

Sam Pearman
Sam Pearman

Reputation: 256

Can I suggest using xPath? It seems like a perfect candidate for what you want to do (but I may be misinterpreting what you're asking).

XPath will let you select particular nodes of an XML/HTML tree, and then you can operate on them from there. After that, it should be a simple task (or a tiny bit of simple regex at most. Personally, I love regex, so let me know if you need help with that).

Your XPath statements will look something like (assuming no conflicting names):

time (data 1):

/div/div/abbr/text()

name (data 2):

/div/div/cite/a/abbr/@title

message (data 3):

/div/div/q/text()

You can get more tech than this if, for example, if you want to identify the elements via their attributes, but what I've given you will be pretty fast.

Upvotes: 0

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