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Bulletproofing SimpleXMLElement

Answer 1

A:

you could always try a SAX parser... A bit more robust to errors.

May not be as efficient on large XML.

Eamorr 2010-07-22 19:00:03

Answer 2

+4 A:

You can load the HTML with DOM's loadHTML then import the result to SimpleXML.

IIRC, it will still choke on some stuff but it will accept pretty much anything that exists in the real world of broken websites.

$html = '<html><head><body><div>stuff & stuff</body></html>';

// disable PHP errors
$old = libxml_use_internal_errors(true);

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);

// restore the old behaviour
libxml_use_internal_errors($old);

$sxe = simplexml_import_dom($dom);
die($sxe->asXML());

Josh Davis 2010-07-22 19:12:58

Uff! That's better... Is this solution *bulletproof*? Can I trust it to parse any document?

Alix Axel 2010-07-22 19:16:42

@Alix well likely not *any* document. If the HTML is too broken, then it's too broken. But for most broken HTML this should work. An alternative would be to use XmlReader. That's a pull parser which let's you define what to do on what element. There is also a number of config options for the underlying libxml extension which you can use to influence the parsing.

Gordon 2010-07-22 19:20:54

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