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Use XPath with PHP's SimpleXML to find nodes containing a String

Answer 1

A:

    $doc = new DOMDocument();
    $doc->loadHTML($xhtml);

    $xPath = new DOMXpath($doc);
    $xPathQuery = "//text()[contains(translate(.,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz', 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'), 'Find me')]";
    $elements = $xPath->query($xPathQuery);

    if($elements->length > 0){

    foreach($elements as $element){
        print "Found: " .$element->nodeValue."<br />";
    }}

Jordy 2010-09-16 11:52:46

Answer 2

A:

It depends on what you want to do. You could select all the <p/> elements that contain "Find me" in any of their descendants with

//xhtml:p[contains(., 'Find me')]

This will return duplicates and so you don't specify the kind of nodes then it will return <body/> and <html/> as well.

Or perhaps you want any node which has a child (not a descendant) text node that contains "Find me"

//*[text()[contains(., 'Find me')]]

This one will not return <html/> or <body/>.

I forgot to mention that . represents the whole text content of a node. text() is used to retrieve [a nodeset of] text nodes. The problem with your expression contains(text(), 'Find me') is that contains() only works on strings, not nodesets and therefore it converts text() to the value of the first node, which is why removing the first <br/> makes it work.

Josh Davis 2010-09-16 11:57:30

Thanks, that one works!

xl-t 2010-09-16 12:14:05

Answer 3

A:

Err, umm? But thanks @Jordy for the quick answer.

First, that's DOM-XML, which is not desired, since everything else in my script is done with SimpleXML.

Second, why do you translate to uppercase and search for an unchanged string 'Find me'? 'Searching for 'FIND ME' would actually give a result.

But you pointed me towards the right direction:

$nodes = $xml->xpath("//text()[contains(., 'Find me')]");

does the trick!

xl-t 2010-09-16 12:12:01

Then vote my answer as the answer :D The translate for uppercase is when you want to make it non-case sensitive

Jordy 2010-09-16 12:20:38

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Use XPath with PHP's SimpleXML to find nodes containing a String

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