CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpxpathdomdocument
b101
b101

Reputation: 379

PHP DomDoc & XPath get number of unknown child elements

I retrieve the contents of a website with DomDoc and query for certain elements with XPath. For example I query for <p> Elements - by doing something like this inside a Loop $paragraphs = $dom->query('//p')->item(i); and then continue to manipulate the <p> inside the loop. Now, is there a way to find out what kind of other HTML elements are maybe inside the <p> and how many other elements are inside the paragraph element?

I have seen this example : PHP Documentation

But this only seems to work if you know something about the child elements? how can I get the count and element name if the "contents" of the <p></p>is unknown to me.

Thank You!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 127

Answers (1)

Martin Honnen
Martin Honnen

Reputation: 167516

Well, on any DOM element you have you can use getElementsByTagName('*') to find all descendant elements or you can use XPath relative to the element to find all child element with the path * or count them with the XPath expression count(*) or you can do the same for all descendant elements using .//* respectively count(.//*).

So given $element = $dom->query('//p')->item(i); you can use $element->getElementsByTagName('*')->length as the DOM way to find all descendants, or $dom->query('.//*', $element) as the XPath way. For the child elements use $dom->query('*', $element).

Upvotes: 2

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