CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpxpathdomdocumentxpathquery
Nahydrin
Nahydrin

Reputation: 13517

DomXPath: Search inside DomXPath query result?

How can I query an xpath result for a sub element, without querying the entire document again?

I query my document to find the last <li> with the class menu-item:

$doc = new DomDocument();
@$doc->loadHTML( $html );
// $html is invalid (and should be at this point),
// so use @ sign to suppress errors
$xpath = new DomXPath( $doc );
$li = $xpath->query( "(//li[contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), 'menu-item')])[last()]" )->item( 0 );

The above works just fine, now I want to query $li to find the following:

$p = $xpath->query( "//p[contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), 'field-description')]" )->item( 0 );

A p tag with class field-description. This does not work and returns the first instance found, if I modify it and use the [last()] (whatever this is) then it works, but it's not necessarily the optimal solution here:

$p = $xpath->query( "(//p[contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), 'field-description')])[last()]" )->item( 0 );

The above line works, but I want to query inside $li not the entire document again.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2509

Answers (1)

kojiro
kojiro

Reputation: 77167

The second argument to query is the contextnode, which limits the search to within that node. However, if you use an absolute xpath, query will still return nodes for the entire document.

php > $dd = new DomDocument();
php > // deliberately using malformed html.
php > $dd->loadhtml('<html><head><title>wat</title></head><body><div>Hello, <p>world</p></div><div class="container"><p>I like pie</div></body></html>');
php > $xp = new DomXPath($dd); 
php > $container = $xp->query('//div[@class="container"]')->item(0);
php > var_dump($xp->query('//p'));
class DOMNodeList#6 (1) {
  public $length =>
  int(2)
}
php > var_dump($xp->query('//p', $container));
class DOMNodeList#4 (1) {
  public $length =>
  int(2)
}
php > var_dump($xp->query('p', $container));
class DOMNodeList#5 (1) {
  public $length =>
  int(1)
}

You can use a pattern like .//x to match all x elements recursively within a context node. (HT: Alf Eaton)

Upvotes: 4

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