Retrieve value of a textarea with PHP

Question

Hello again,

Would anyone perhaps know how to get the value of a specific element in an HTML document with PHP? What I'm doing right now is using file_get_contents to pull up the HTML code from another website, and on that website there is a textarea:

<textarea id="body" name="body" rows="12" cols="75" tabindex="1">Hello World!</textarea>

What I want to do is have my script do the file_get_contents and just pull out the "Hello World!" from the textarea. Is that possible? Sorry for bugging you guys, again, you give such helpful advice :].

Answer 1

Don't be sorry for bugging us, this is a good question I'm happy to answer. You can use PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser to get what you need:

$html     = file_get_html('http://www.domain.com/');
$textarea = $html->find('textarea[id=body]'); 
$contents = $textarea->innertext;

echo $contents; // Outputs 'Hello World!'

If you want to use file_get_contents(), you can do it like this:

$raw_html = file_get_contents('http://www.domain.com/');
$html     = str_get_html($raw_html);
...

Although I don't see any need for the file_get_contents() as you can use the outertext method to get the original, full HTML out if you need it somewhere:

$html     = file_get_html('http://www.domain.com/');
$raw_html = $html->outertext;

---

Just for the kicks, you can do this also with an one-liner regular expression:

preg_match('~<textarea id="body".*?>(.*?)</textarea>~', file_get_contents('http://www.domain.com/'), $matches);
echo $matches[1][0]; // Outputs 'Hello World!'

I'd strongly advise against this though as you are a lot more vulnerable to code changes which might break this regular expression.

Answer 2

I'd suggest using PHPs DOM & DOMXPath classes.

$dom = DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile( $url );
$xpath = new DOMXPath( $dom );
$nodes = $xpath->query('//textarea[id=body]' )

$result = array();
for( $nodes as $node ) {
    $result[] = $node->textContent;
}

There $result would contain the value of every textarea with id body.