Grabbing links using xpath in php

Question

i am trying to grab links from the Google search page. i am using the be below xpath to

//div[@id='ires']/ol[@id='rso']/li/h3/a/@href

grab the links. xPather evaluates it and gives the result. But when i use it with my php it doesn't show any result. Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? There is nothing wrong with the cURL.

below is my code

$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($result);

$xpath=new DOMXPath($dom);
$elements = $xpath->evaluate("//div[@id='ires']/ol[@id='rso']/li/h3/a");

foreach ($elements as $element)
{
   $link  = $element->getElementsByTagName("href")->item(0)->nodeValue;

   echo $link."<br>";
}

Sample Html provided by Robert Pitt

<li class="g w0">
    <h3 class="r">
       <a href="" class="l"><em>LINK</em></a>
    </h3>
    <button class="ws" title=""></button>
    <div class="s">
        META
    </div>
</li>

Answer 1

Theres no element called href, thats an attribute:

$link  = $element->getElementsByTagName("href")->item(0)->nodeValue;

You can just use

$link  = $element->getAttribute('href');

Answer 2

You can make life simpler by using the original XPath expression that you quoted:

//div[@id='ires']/ol[@id='rso']/li/h3/a/@href

Then, loop over the matching attributes like:

$hrefs = $xpath->evaluate(...);
foreach ($hrefs as $href) {
    echo $href->value . "<br>";
}

Be sure to check whether any attributes were matched (var_dump($hrefs->length) would suffice).

Answer 3

did you try

$element->getElementsByTagName("a")

instead of

$element->getElementsByTagName("href")