HTML Parser to Get Content between Elements

Question

Hi guys,

I'm looking to parse data out of about 100 pages, all of which have this string of HTML in it:

<span class="cell CellFullWidth"><span class="SectionHeader">EVENT</span><br/><div class="Center">Event Name</div></span>

I'm not very familiar with parsers, so I'm wondering what I should use to extract the "Event Name" from each page that I loop through, and how I should go about doing that.

I looked into Simple HTML DOM but I couldn't quite figure it out. Please help, thanks!

Answer 1

If all the text except the event name is always the same, you can do it with just a substring (since the start and end bits will always be the same length)

$event_name = substr($current_line, 98, -14);

That'll give you what's left over when you remove the first 98 characters and the last 14.

Answer 2

You could use PHP's DOM manipulation functions.

Basically, you'd create a new DOMDocument via DOMDocument::loadHTML() or DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile(), and then use $yourDOmObject->getElementsByTagName() to get all the <span> elements.

Answer 3

Assuming:

• All event names are in divs
• The containing div must have the class "Center"
• All divs with the class "Center" contains the name of an event

Here goes:

<?php

$content = '
<span class="cell CellFullWidth"><span class="SectionHeader">EVENT</span><br/><div class="Center">Event Name1</div></span>
<span class="cell CellFullWidth"><span class="SectionHeader">EVENT</span><br/><div class="Center">Event Name2</div></span>

';

$html = new DOMDocument();

$html->loadHTML($content);

$divs = $html->getElementsByTagName('div');

foreach($divs as $div) {
    if($div->getAttribute('class') == 'Center') {
        $events[] = $div->nodeValue;
    }
}

print_r($events);