PHP DOMParser Help

Question

As recommended in a previous question of mine, I am using the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser as a way to search an HTML document and grab contents from a specific element (in my case, a textarea). I was wondering if anyone had used this before and was able to give me any advice for my problem (or recommend another solution). The code I'm using looks like this:

include "../simple_html_dom.php";
$html     = file_get_html('http://example.com');
$textarea = $html->find('textarea[id=body]'); 
$contents = $textarea->outertext;

echo $contents;

My problem is that the script runs the code and retrieves no data from the element (which looks like this:

<textarea id="body" name="body" rows="12" cols="75" tabindex="3">
At 2/21/10 10:15 PM, You wrote
: Hello world,
: how are you today?

</textarea>

I'm sorry to ask for advice with this certain method, but if anyone else has any advice it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much in advance

Answer 1

As you can see in the documentation find returns an array, so for starters you shouldnt treat it as if it were a node. Also, what you want is innertext not outertext.

This should work:

include "../simple_html_dom.php";
$html     = file_get_html('http://example.com');
$textarea = $html->find('textarea[id=body]'); 
$contents = $textarea[0]->innertext;

echo $contents;

Answer 2

The page you linked to says the following:

// Find all <div> which attribute id=foo
$ret = $html->find('div[id=foo]'); 

This suggests to me that $ret would be a collection. Syntactically, you're using something similar to CSS attribute selectors. Since this syntax is meant to be generalized to apply to any attribute, the fact that id should be unique isn't considered and a collection is returned... I suspect that if you tried something like this...

$ret = $html->find('div#foo'); 

... it might work.