PHP Simple HTML Dom Memory Issue

Question

I'm running into memory issues with PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser. I'm parsing a fair sized doc and need to run down the DOM tree...

1)I'm starting with the whole file:

$html = file_get_html($file);

2)then parsing out my table:

$table = $html->find('table.big'); 

3)then parsing out my rows:

$rows = $table[0]->find('tr');

What I'm ending up with are three GIANT objects... anyone know how to dump an object after I've parsed it for the data I need? Like $html is useless by step 3, yet, it's the largest of all the objects.

Any ideas?

Is there a way to drill down to my table rows out of the original $html object?

Thanks in advance.

EDIT:

I've managed to skip step two with:

$rows = $this->html->find('table.big tr');

But am still running into memory issues...

Answer 1

...how to dump an object after I've parsed it for the data I need? Like $html...

unset($html) ?

or $html = null; might work better - more of an immediate affect?

Answer 2

If memory is really a big concern, you may want to look into SAX instead of using DOM. You may want to try unset() on the $html after obtaining $table, but that is simply just marking it to be garbage collected and memory won't be freed up immediately.

At the end of the day, it is really up to how memory-efficient Simple HTML DOM is written or which implementation you have chosen.