PHP XPath, cannot retrieve text after tags inside targeted tags

Question

I have this html code, to do xpath on it:

<b>Random Field:</b>
<p>
   A random field describes an <a href="/index.php?page=glossary&term_id=230">
   experiment</a> with outcomes being functions of more than one continuous variable, 
   for example U(x,y,z), where  x, y, and z are coordinates in space. Random field is 
   extension of the concept of <a href="/index.php?page=glossary&term_id=598">random 
   process</a> into the case of multivariate argument.
</p>

I tried this to take the text inside the <p> tag:

$dom = new DomDocument();
$dom->loadHtml($curl_scraped_page);
$xpath = new DomXPath($dom);
print $xpath->evaluate('string(//p[preceding::b]/text())');

But it just gave me this:

A random field describes an

What I want is:

A random field describes an ..(an so on until).. of multivariate argument. So I'm guessing the problem lies on the <a> tag. Cause every time I tried to do this on the same-patterned document, it stops right before this <a> tag. Thanks..

Wrikken · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-11 16:59:37Z

1

This would work:

$xpath->query('//p[preceding::b]')->item(0)->textContent;

There's a string-join function in XPath, but sadly not in the XPath 1.0 version in lbxml which PHP uses.

answered Jul 11, 2013 at 16:59

Wrikken

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2 Comments

Safira Over a year ago

Thank you ^^ What's the difference between evaluate and query? What does item(0) mean there? Thanks..

Wrikken Over a year ago

evaluate() will return a typed result (nodelist, string, integer,etc.) result if possible, ->query() always returns a DOMNodeList, ->item(0) gets the first (0-indexed) item from that list, in this case the sole (first) <p/> element. If there are more <p/> nodes you wish to capture, you'd loop through the DOMNodelist that ->query() returns & concatenate the ->textContent of the items in there 'manually'.

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