how to use dom php parser

I'm new to DOM parsing in PHP:
I have a HTML file that I'm trying to parse. It has a bunch of DIVs like this:

<div id="interestingbox"> 
   <div id="interestingdetails" class="txtnormal">
        <div>Content1</div>
        <div>Content2</div>
   </div>
</div>

<div id="interestingbox"> 
......

I'm trying to get the contents of the many div boxes using php. How can I use the DOM parser to do this?

Thanks!


Solution 1:

First i have to tell you that you can't use the same id on two different divs; there are classes for that point. Every element should have an unique id.

Code to get the contents of the div with id="interestingbox"

$html = '
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<div id="interestingbox"> 
   <div id="interestingdetails" class="txtnormal">
        <div>Content1</div>
        <div>Content2</div>
   </div>
</div>

<div id="interestingbox2"><a href="#">a link</a></div>
</body>
</html>';


$dom_document = new DOMDocument();

$dom_document->loadHTML($html);

//use DOMXpath to navigate the html with the DOM
$dom_xpath = new DOMXpath($dom_document);

// if you want to get the div with id=interestingbox
$elements = $dom_xpath->query("*/div[@id='interestingbox']");

if (!is_null($elements)) {

  foreach ($elements as $element) {
    echo "\n[". $element->nodeName. "]";

    $nodes = $element->childNodes;
    foreach ($nodes as $node) {
      echo $node->nodeValue. "\n";
    }

  }
}

//OUTPUT
[div]  {
        Content1
        Content2
}

Example with classes:

$html = '
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<div class="interestingbox"> 
   <div id="interestingdetails" class="txtnormal">
        <div>Content1</div>
        <div>Content2</div>
   </div>
</div>

<div class="interestingbox"><a href="#">a link</a></div>
</body>
</html>';

//the same as before.. just change the xpath

[...]

$elements = $dom_xpath->query("*/div[@class='interestingbox']");

[...]

//OUTPUT
[div]  {
        Content1
        Content2
}

[div]  {
a link
}

Refer to the DOMXPath page for more details.

Solution 2:

I got this to work using simplehtmldom as a start:

$html = file_get_html('example.com');
foreach ($html->find('div[id=interestingbox]') as $result)
{
    echo $result->innertext;
}