php domdocument read element inner text

Question

I'm new to php so please forgive the simple question:

How do I extract the text from an element?

     <span id="myElement">Some text I want to read</span>

I have this for a start:

<?php
      $data = $dom->getElementById("myElement");
      $html = $dom->saveHTML($data);

But then? What is the correct instruction?

lonesomeday · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-11 22:24:42Z

22

To get the text that an element contains, you need the textContent property:

$text = $data->textContent;

answered Jun 11, 2013 at 22:24

lonesomeday

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3 Comments

thomasrutter Over a year ago

Abby way to emulate innerText specifically? So for example <div>some text</div><div>more text</div> doesn't become some textmore text but separates the words?

Shmack Over a year ago

@thomasrutter , given how much time has passed from this post til now, my hunch is that you will have to iterate through each child element and get its textContent?

thomasrutter Over a year ago

The answer to this is that XML/DOM isn't intended to be able to know when whitespace should or shouldn't be implicitly inserted as that's a detail of a higher level. If you take the simple approach of always assuming implied whitespace at element boundaries there are cases where you'll get undesired whitespace such as around certain inline elements. So yes you do need to do a more sophisticated application-level conversion from eg HTML to formatted text. That's basically what innerText is - it's not standard DOM because it's application aware and is formatting with knowledge of HTML.

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