ansaurus

Question

I want to extract the contents of a node as a string using XPath and PHP

Answer 1

A:

How about you wrap you output arround <pre> tags
echo "<pre>" . $matches->item(0)->nodeValue . "</pre>";

c0mrade 2010-09-13 13:37:49

Hi C0mrade. That produces: <pre>The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men</pre> Its the text contained in the string that I'm interested in not how it displays on a browser (I'm just echoing it to the browser to see what it has done).

spiderPlant0 2010-09-13 13:39:54

Answer 2

A:

try giving these 2 a go!

1

echo $matches->item(0)->textContent;

2

echo $matches->item(0);

The first one returns the text content of this node and its descendants, and the second one is trying to access the magic method __toString().. depending on how DOMDocument is built it could be the value that your already getting.

RobertPitt 2010-09-13 13:58:06

Hi, textContent gives the same result as nodeValue. The second suggestion produces an error.

spiderPlant0 2010-09-13 14:05:09

__toString() isn't defined for DOMNode.

GZipp 2010-09-13 15:18:18

Answer 3

A:

This will work but without XPath;

$xPathDom = new DOMDocument();
$xPathDom->loadHTML( $inDocStg );
echo $xPathDom->saveXML($xPathDom->getElementsByTagName('div')->item(0));

or

$xPathDom = new DOMDocument();
$xPathDom->loadHTML( $inDocStg );
$xPathDom->getElementsByTagName('div')->item(0);
echo $xPathDom->saveHTML();

Centurion 2010-09-13 14:25:43

`DOMXPath::query` returns `DOMNodeList` so it should work fine as your passing in the same entity type as `X->item(0)` - `$xPath->query( "//div" )->item(0)` returns the same as `$X->getElementsByTagName('div')->item(0)`

RobertPitt 2010-09-13 14:39:46

This doesnt work. I pasted in the code above (the bit after the '... Xpath would be') And it just printed out the entire HTML document not the node contents selected by xpath. Did you get it to work? I also tried saveHTML() on the $xPath->query( "//div" )->item(0) and this produced an error.

spiderPlant0 2010-09-13 15:22:03

@spiderPlant0. Yes the edit wasn't working the way you need , I deleted and left those without XPath, because it wasn't the answer that you are looking for.

Centurion 2010-09-13 15:38:10

Also, I cant use getElementsByTagName('div') as I need a generalised xPath expression (my example is simplified).

spiderPlant0 2010-09-13 16:49:37

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

I want to extract the contents of a node as a string using XPath and PHP

1

2

related questions