Parsing of badly formated HTML in PHP

Question

In my code I convert some styled xls document to html using openoffice. I then parse the tables using xml_parser_create. The problem is that openoffice creates oldschool html with unclosed <BR> and <HR> tags, it doesn't create doctypes and don't quote attributes <TABLE WIDTH=4>.

The php parsers I know off don't like this, and yield xml formating errors. My current solution is to run some regexes over the file before I parse it, but this is neither nice nor fast.

Do you know a (hopefully included) php-parser, that doesn't care about these kinds of mistakes? Or perhaps a fast way to fix a 'broken' html?

Answer 1

There is SimpleHTML

For repairing broken HTML, you could use Tidy.

As an alternative you can use the native XML Reader. Because it is acts as a cursor going forward on the document stream and stopping at each node on the way, it will not break on invalid XML documents.

See http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-pullparsingphp.html

Answer 2

A solution to "fix" broken HTML could be to use HTMLPurifier (quoting) :

HTML Purifier is a standards-compliant HTML filter library written in PHP.
HTML Purifier will not only remove all malicious code (better known as XSS) with a thoroughly audited, secure yet permissive whitelist, it will also make sure your documents are standards compliant

An alternative idea might be to try loading your HTML with DOMDocument::loadHTML (quoting) :

The function parses the HTML contained in the string source . Unlike loading XML, HTML does not have to be well-formed to load.

And if you're trying to load HTML from a file, see DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile.

Answer 3

Any particular reason you're still using the PHP 4 XML API?

If you can get away with using PHP 5's XML API, there are two possibilities.

First, try the built-in HTML parser. It's really not very good (it tends to choke on poorly formatted HTML), but it might do the trick. Have a look at DomDocument::LoadHTML.

Second option - you could try the HTML parser based on the HTML5 parser specification:

http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/

This tends to work better than the built-in PHP HTML parser. It loads the HTML into a DomDocument object.