PHP Simple HTML DOM parser

Question

I am working with simple web crawler. Below is simple html code i used to learn.

input.php

<ul id="nav">
    <li>
        <a href="www.google.com">Google</a>
        <ul>
            <li>
                <a href="mail.gmail.com">Gmail</a>
            </li>
        </ul>
    </li>
    <li>
        <a href="www.yahoo.com">Yahoo</a>
        <ul>
            <li>
                <a href="mail.yahoo.com">Yahoo Mail</a>
            </li>
        </ul>
    </li>
</ul>

I need to crawl the first anchor tag in ul[id=nav]->li. The code i used to crawl input.php is

<?php
    include 'simple_html_dom.php';
    $html = file_get_html('input.php');

    foreach ($html->find('ul[id=nav]') as $navUL){
        foreach ($navUL->find('li') as $navUL_LI){
            echo $navUL_LI->find('a',0)->outertext."<br>";              
        }
    }
?>

It Displays all the anchor tag in my input.php. I need to display only google and yahoo. How can i achieve this?

Kevin · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-05 08:43:52Z

1

In this case you can directly point it out with children() method. Example:

foreach($html->find('ul#nav') as $ul) {
    foreach($ul->children() as $li) {
        echo $li->children(0)->outertext . '<br/>';
    }
}

Alternatively, you can use DOMDocument + DOMXpath for this too:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($str);
$xpath = new DOMXpath($dom);
// directly target those links
$links = $xpath->query('//ul[@id="nav"]/li/a');

foreach($links as $a) {
    echo $a->nodeValue . '<br/>';
}

edited Sep 5, 2014 at 8:43

answered Sep 5, 2014 at 8:14

Kevin

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Comments

Yamu · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-05 08:09:31Z

1

<?php
    include 'simple_html_dom.php';
    $html = file_get_html('input.php');

    foreach ($html->find('ul[id=nav]') as $navUL){
        foreach ($navUL->find('li') as $navUL_LI){
            if(strpos($navUL_LI,'google')||strpos($navUL_LI,'google')){
                echo $navUL_LI->find('a',0)->outertext."<br>";
                       }

        }
    }
?>

answered Sep 5, 2014 at 8:09

Yamu

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Comments

Denis Kohl · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-05 08:10:42Z

0

i have done the same work in Objective-c.

You can use the XML or HTML api's to serialize your html object.

If you want to do this form cold hand... find open tag and the close tag.

After this get first child, then the second and so on...

answered Sep 5, 2014 at 8:10

Denis Kohl

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Comments

i alarmed alien · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-05 08:40:52Z

0

Try this:

// get the children of the element #nav, i.e. the top level lis
$lis = $html->getElementById("#nav")->childNodes();
// for each child, find the first 'a' element
foreach ($lis as $li) {
    $a = $li->find('a',0);
    // retrieve the link text itself.
    echo "link text: " . $a->innertext() . "\n";
}

See the simple-html-dom manual for details of all these methods.

answered Sep 5, 2014 at 8:40

i alarmed alien

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Comments

Bijay Rai · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-05 09:29:53Z

0

you can simply achieve that by:

<?php
      foreach ($html->find('ul[id=nav]') as $navUL){
        foreach ($navUL->find('li') as $navUL_LI){
            echo $navUL_LI->find('a',-2)->outertext."<br>";              
        }
    }
?>

edited Sep 5, 2014 at 9:29

answered Sep 5, 2014 at 8:23

Bijay Rai

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3 Comments

dharanbro Over a year ago

Can you explain me what does the parameter -2 do in the method find()?

Bijay Rai Over a year ago

@DharanBro -2 parameter find latest two anchor and returns element object or null if not found (zero based).. for more info: simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/manual.htm If it helps you, please do upVotes :)

dharanbro Over a year ago

I have n number of anchor tags..In such case how can i do this??

Victor Nazarov · Accepted Answer · 2018-11-16 00:28:42Z

<?php
$in = '<style>      .catalog-product-view .product.attribute.overview ul {         margin-top: 10px;     } </style><img src="/media/wysiwyg/img/misc/made-in-the-usa-doh-blue4.png"><ul><li>Ships as (12) 40 fl oz bottles</li></ul>';

function parseTags($input, $callback) {
    $len = strlen($input);
    $stack = [];

    $tag = "";
    $data = "";
    $isTag = false;
    $isString = false;
    for ($i=0; $i<$len; $i++) {
       $char = $input[$i];
       if ($char == '<') {
           $isTag = true;
           $tag .= $char;
       } else if ($char == '>') {
           $tag .= $char;
           if (substr($tag, 0, 2) == '</') {
               $close = str_replace('>', '', str_replace('</', '', explode(' ', $tag, 1)[0]));
               $open = str_replace('>', '', str_replace('<', '', explode(' ', end($stack), 1)[0]));
               if ($open == $close) {
                   $callback($tag, $data, $stack, $i, false);
                   array_pop($stack);
               }
           } else if (substr($tag, -2) == '/>') {
               $callback($tag, $data, $stack, $i, false);
           } else {
               $callback($tag, $data, $stack, $i, true);
               $stack[] = $tag;
           }
           $tag = "";
           $data = "";
           $isTag = false;
       } else if ($char == '"' || $char == "'") {
           if ($isString == false) {
               $isString = $char;
           } else if ($isString == $char && $input[$i-1] != '\\') {
               $isString = false;
           }
       } else if ($isTag) { 
           $tag .= $char; 
       } else { 
           $data .= $char; 
       }
    }
}

parseTags($in, function($tag, $data, $stack, $position, $isOpen) use (&$out) {
    print_r(func_get_args());
});

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