Getting DOM elements by classname

Update: Xpath version of *[@class~='my-class'] css selector

So after my comment below in response to hakre's comment, I got curious and looked into the code behind Zend_Dom_Query. It looks like the above selector is compiled to the following xpath (untested):

[contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), ' my-class ')]

So the PHP would be:

$dom = new DomDocument();
$dom->load($filePath);
$finder = new DomXPath($dom);
$classname="my-class";
$nodes = $finder->query("//*[contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), ' $classname ')]");

Basically, all we do here is normalize the class attribute so that even a single class is bounded by spaces, and the complete class list is bounded in spaces. Then append the class we are searching for with a space. This way we are effectively looking for and find only instances of my-class .

Use an xpath selector?

$dom = new DomDocument();
$dom->load($filePath);
$finder = new DomXPath($dom);
$classname="my-class";
$nodes = $finder->query("//*[contains(@class, '$classname')]");

If it is only ever one type of element you can replace the * with the particular tagname.

If you need to do a lot of this with very complex selector I would recommend Zend_Dom_Query which supports CSS selector syntax (a la jQuery):

$finder = new Zend_Dom_Query($html);
$classname = 'my-class';
$nodes = $finder->query("*[class~=\"$classname\"]");

If you wish to get the innerhtml of the class without the zend you could use this:

$dom = new DomDocument();
$dom->load($filePath);
$classname = 'main-article';
$finder = new DomXPath($dom);
$nodes = $finder->query("//*[contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), ' $classname ')]");
$tmp_dom = new DOMDocument(); 
foreach ($nodes as $node) 
    {
    $tmp_dom->appendChild($tmp_dom->importNode($node,true));
    }
$innerHTML.=trim($tmp_dom->saveHTML()); 
echo $innerHTML;

I think the accepted way is better, but I guess this might work as well

function getElementByClass(&$parentNode, $tagName, $className, $offset = 0) {
    $response = false;

    $childNodeList = $parentNode->getElementsByTagName($tagName);
    $tagCount = 0;
    for ($i = 0; $i < $childNodeList->length; $i++) {
        $temp = $childNodeList->item($i);
        if (stripos($temp->getAttribute('class'), $className) !== false) {
            if ($tagCount == $offset) {
                $response = $temp;
                break;
            }

            $tagCount++;
        }

    }

    return $response;
}

There is also another approach without the use of DomXPath or Zend_Dom_Query.

Based on dav's original function, I wrote the following function that returns all the children of the parent node whose tag and class match the parameters.

function getElementsByClass(&$parentNode, $tagName, $className) {
    $nodes=array();

    $childNodeList = $parentNode->getElementsByTagName($tagName);
    for ($i = 0; $i < $childNodeList->length; $i++) {
        $temp = $childNodeList->item($i);
        if (stripos($temp->getAttribute('class'), $className) !== false) {
            $nodes[]=$temp;
        }
    }

    return $nodes;
}

suppose you have a variable $html the following HTML:

<html>
 <body>
  <div id="content_node">
    <p class="a">I am in the content node.</p>
    <p class="a">I am in the content node.</p>
    <p class="a">I am in the content node.</p>    
  </div>
  <div id="footer_node">
    <p class="a">I am in the footer node.</p>
  </div>
 </body>
</html>

use of getElementsByClass is as simple as:

$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'utf-8');
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$content_node=$dom->getElementById("content_node");

$div_a_class_nodes=getElementsByClass($content_node, 'div', 'a');//will contain the three nodes under "content_node".

Getting DOM elements by classname

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