CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpweb-scrapingsimple-html-dom
TARKUS
TARKUS

Reputation: 2200

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function find() on null using Simple HTML DOM

I'm using Simple HTML DOM to get elements and values from a website I'm scraping. It works great, but every 23,000 pages or so, I hit the equivalent of a 404 page not found, in which the normal html structure is not present. This results in a fatal error I want to escape without breaking the page.

Here is the full error report:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function find() on null in C:\xampp\htdocs\scrape\simple_html_dom.php:1113 Stack trace: #0 C:\xampp\htdocs\scrape\scrape_detailtable.php(133): simple_html_dom->find('div[id=detailta...') #1 {main} thrown in C:\xampp\htdocs\scrape\simple_html_dom.php on line 1113

Here are the lines in my script where the error occurs:

$doc = new simple_html_dom($record_content);
if ( ! is_null($doc->find("div[id=detailtable]")) ) // <-- this line

$record_content is the html retrieved using a cURL.

I've tried 

if( ! isset($doc->find("div[id=detailtable]")) ) , 
if( ! is_null($doc->find("div[id=detailtable]")) ) , 
if( ! empty($doc->find("div[id=detailtable]")) ) , and , 
if( ! $doc->find("div[id=detailtable]") )  ...

...and the page keeps breaking. I just want to escape processing on condition of the existence of div[id=detailtable].

update on 6/30/2016

I got another PHP error trying different escape and "detect not null" methods (Maybe this is new with PHP 7). Eventually I tried something where PHP threw this suggestion, along with the error: (paraphrasing) "You can use null !== expression"

So now my code reads: if ( null !== $doc->find( 'a' ) ){

Blah! still getting "Uncaught Error: Call to a member function find() on null" so I guess null !== expression doesn't really work.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3837

Answers (1)

keupsonite
keupsonite

Reputation: 399

Try something like that:

$doc = new simple_html_dom($record_content);
if ( $doc ) {
    if ( ($find = $doc->find("div[id=detailtable]")) ) {
        // do what you want with the $find variable
    }
    if ( ($find = $doc->find("div[id=detailtable2]")) ) {
        // do what you want with the $find variable
    }
    if ( ($find = $doc->find("div[id=detailtable3]")) ) {
        // do what you want with the $find variable
    }
}

Upvotes: 1

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