Count columns in a HTML table with PHP

Question

I have a basic string with holds a html table. The table looks like this:

<TR>
    <TD>asdf, dfg</TD><TD>0915</TD><TD>0945</TD><TD></TD><TD>15</TD><TD>45</TD><TD></TD><TD>1315</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
    <TD>asdf, dfg</TD><TD>0915</TD><TD>0945</TD><TD></TD><TD>15</TD><TD>45</TD><TD></TD><TD>1315</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
    <TD>asdf, dfg</TD><TD>0915</TD><TD>0945</TD><TD></TD><TD>15</TD><TD>45</TD><TD></TD><TD>1315</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
    <TD>asdf, dfg</TD><TD>0915</TD><TD>0945</TD><TD></TD><TD>15</TD><TD>45</TD><TD></TD><TD>1315</TD>
</TR>

How would I use PHP to determine how many columns this table has?

Do yuou want to count how many td are there inside one tr or inside all the table? — mck89
– mck89, Commented Sep 2, 2009 at 14:25

Community · Accepted Answer · 2023-11-17 20:38:18Z

3

Count <TD>'s with substr_count(). If your string contains more than one row, then count <TR>'s and divide total number of <TD>'s by number of <TR>'s.

edited Nov 17, 2023 at 20:38

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answered Sep 2, 2009 at 14:16

n1313

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6 Comments

Evernoob Over a year ago

how about counting </td>'s? :P

n1313 Over a year ago

First, author did not state that his html may be malformed. Second, to place string "<TD>" inside <td> tag one should replace brackets with corresponding entities, so they won't be caught up by substr_count().

Peter Bailey Over a year ago

@Gorgapor - no it can't. If "<TD>" exists in the string, then it's HTML, and the browser will even attempt to render it that way. If it was text it would look like this "<TD>" which obviously wouldn't trigger a hit with substr_count(). If you did have an actual, errant "<TD>" then your count would be invalid only because the HTML is invalid, not because the algorithm isn't sound.

Kawa Over a year ago

Agreed with Peter Bailey, and upvoted. It's much easier than Gorgapor's method, and Bailey's right about the entities.

Christian Oudard Over a year ago

Yes, if your HTML is guaranteed valid, this is a good way to do it.

|

Christian Oudard · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-02 14:49:24Z

2

As others have mentioned, if you have guaranteed valid HTML, and the table is guaranteed to have equal length rows, you can use simple string manipulation. Split the string on <tr>, then count the number of <td> in each piece:

function count_table_columns($html) {
    $html = strtolower($html);
    $rows = split('<tr>', $html);
    foreach($rows as $row) {
        if(!trim($row)) { continue; }
        return substr_count($row, '<td>');
    }
}

If there is the possibility of malformed HTML, use an HTML parser to parse the table, then iterate through the <tr> nodes, and count the subnodes of type <td>.

Here's one HTML parser to consider: http://sourceforge.net/projects/simplehtmldom/

edited Sep 2, 2009 at 14:49

answered Sep 2, 2009 at 14:13

Christian Oudard

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Comments

JaseC · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-26 01:26:55Z

0

This is simplehtmldom code that basically gets the number of columns in the HTML table

$table = $html->find('table',0);

foreach($table->find('tr') as $tr)
               {
                   $c=0;
                   foreach($tr->find('td') as $td) $c++;    
                   if( $c>$largest OR !isset($largest) ) $largest = $c; 
               }

$largest will give you column count.

answered Sep 26, 2013 at 1:26

JaseC

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