CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpsearchdomxpath
Don Briggs
Don Briggs

Reputation: 550

PHP: searching for a specific element somewhere in an HTML document

I have a rather large HTML document that I am trying to extract information from. I have gotten as far as figuring out that I probably need to use a DOMDocument object, and xPath. I need to return the contents of a specific DIV. The good news is that it has a class tag associated with it. The bad news is that it is buried in some non-specific location in the HTML document, within several layers of othere DIV's, and that location may change. So, what I am looking to return the contents of the div.

<div class='target'>Return all of this stuff</div>

The trick seems to be in that I don't know the particular location that this particular div will be in. I need a way to just say 'search the entire DOM for the div with the class-name of target'. there may be multiple coinsurance, but probably not. However, once I get the, probably array of element contents, I can take it from there. And again, using PHP 5.4.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 191

Answers (2)

user1833028
user1833028

Reputation: 943

If I understand correctly, this can be accomplished with native php string handling alone.

Have you tried something along the lines of.

$start = stripos($STRINGYOUARESEARCHING, "<div class='target'>")
$end= stripos($STRINGYOUARESEARCHING, "</div>",start);
$contents= substr($STRINGYOUARESEARCHING, $start, $end-$start)

Let me know if this isn't the kind of answer you're looking for... here I assume you have a large block of HTML with your target in it?

(Note: You may have to offset $end or $start by strlen(<div class='target'>)

Upvotes: 0

didierc
didierc

Reputation: 14730

The xpath query you need is:

$query = "//div[@class='target']";

which you can use with a DOMXPath object by invoking the query method.

Upvotes: 2

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