How to parse XML/HTML server's reponse?

Question

Hello, my first time here. I got these lines as a response from the server and saved them in a file. They look like XML, right? My task is to read the content of those td tags and put them into other structured file(Excel). The problem is I dont know how to do that.

At the moment, I think I will strip the first and last line of the file then parse them into XML. But do you know other ways ? Thanks.

<CallbackContent><![CDATA[
    <table cellspacing="0" border="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
        <tr class="rowcolor2">
            <td align="left" style="padding:5px;">22/02/2010</td>                        
            <td align="right" style="padding:5px;">510,02</td>
        </tr>
    </table>     
]]></CallbackContent>

Btw, I'm using PHP.

Answer 1

You cannot read the table with an XML parser, because it is pushed out as a CDATA block, which equivocates to a string literal.

Answer 2

First, read the whole thing using a XML parser so that you can pull out the contents of the CDATA section. Then take that and stuff it through an HTML parser.

Answer 3

Use an XML parser such as SimpleXML. It will allow you to extract the CDATA safely.

Then if the HTML is XML-compliant (in other words, it's XHTML) you can use SimpleXML to extract data from it. For example:

$xml='<CallbackContent><![CDATA[
    <table cellspacing="0" border="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
        <tr class="rowcolor2">
            <td align="left" style="padding:5px;">22/02/2010</td>                        
            <td align="right" style="padding:5px;">510,02</td>
        </tr>
    </table>     
]]></CallbackContent>';

$CallbackContent = simplexml_load_string($xml);
$html = (string) $CallbackContent;

// if XHTML
$table = simplexml_load_string($html);

// otherwise, use
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$table = simplexml_import_dom($dom)->body->table;

foreach ($table->tr as $tr)
{
    echo 'tr class=', $tr['class'], "\n";
    foreach ($tr->td as $td)
    {
        echo 'td align=', $td['align'], ' - value: ', (string) $td, "\n";
    }
}