James Morris - JMOZ

I pretend I know PHP and internet stuff.

Parsing HTML With DOMDocument and DOMXpath::query

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The other day I needed to do some html scraping to trim out some repeated data stuck inside nested divs and produce a simplified array of said data. My first port of call was SimpleXML which I have used many times. However this time, the son of a bitch just wouldn’t work with me and kept on throwing up parsing errors. I lost my patience with it and decided to give DomDocument and DOMXpath a go which I’d heard of but never used.

All of the examples I could find showed basic parsing of html, e.g. grabbing all a elements on a page, or grabbing all the child book elements in a bookstore XML document. I needed to grab all the divs with a certain class then further parse their html to pull out bits of data. Here’s the html I’m working with for this example:

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<html>
    <body>
        <h1>Foo</h1>
        <div id="content">
            <div class="foo">
                <div><img class="fooimage" src="http://foo.com/bar.png" /></div>
                <p class="description">Foo bar</p>
            </div>
            <div class="foo">
                <div><img class="fooimage" src="http://foo.com/baz.png" /></div>
                <p class="description">Baz bat</p>
            </div>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

Using DOMXPath::query to extract html data

I want an array of image src attribute values along with the value for the p elements. The basic method of doing this is to query for the div.foo elements using DOMXPath::query which will return a DOMNodeList. The list can then be iterated over which will produce a DOMNode every iteration. Once the DOMNode for the div.foo element has been obtained, we need to then query again using DOMXPath::query but crucially pass the node as the $contextnode 2nd parameter, this will make the query relative to the div.foo node and allow us to grab the child img element’s src attribute, and also the description from the p element.

Here’s the test script:

Which gives the desired result:

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Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [image_src] => http://foo.com/bar.png
            [desc] => Foo bar
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [image_src] => http://foo.com/baz.png
            [desc] => Baz bat
        )

)

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