Parsing table content in php/regex and getting result by td

Question

I have a table like this which I spent a full day trying to get the data from:

<table class="table table-condensed">
<tr>
<td>Monthely rent</td>
<td><strong>Fr. 1'950. </strong></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>Rooms(s)</td>
<td><strong>3</strong></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>Surface</td>
<td><strong>93m2</strong></td>

</tr>

<tr>
<td>Date of Contract</td>
<td><strong>01.04.17</strong></td>
</tr>

</table>

As you can see the data is well organized, and I am trying to get this result:

monthly rent => Fr. 1'950. 
Rooms(s) => 3
Surface => 93m2
Date of Contract => 01.04.17

I have the table contained inside a variable $table and tried to use DOM

$dom = new DOMDocument(); 
$dom->loadHTML($table);
$dom = new \DomXPath($dom);
$result = $dom->query('//table/tr');
return $result;

But to no avail, is there any easier way to get the contents in php/regex?

ThW · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-25 10:04:07Z

2

You're on the right track with DOM and Xpath. Do not use Regular Expressions to parse HTML/XML. RegEx are for matching text and often used as a part of a parser. But a parser for a format knows about it features - a RegEx does not.

You should keep you variable names a little more clean. Do not assign different types to the same variable in the same context. It only shows that the variable name might be to generic.

DOMXpath::query() allows you to use Xpath expressions, but only expression that return a node list. DOMXpath::evaluate() allows you to fetch scalar values, too.

So you can fetch the tr elements, iterate them and use additional expression to fetch the two values using the tr element as the context.

$document = new \DOMDocument(); 
$document->loadHTML($table);
$xpath = new \DOMXPath($document);

foreach ($xpath->evaluate('//table/tr') as $tr) {
  var_dump(
     $xpath->evaluate('string(td[1])', $tr),
     $xpath->evaluate('string(td[2]/strong)', $tr)
  );
}

Output:

string(13) "Monthely rent"
string(11) "Fr. 1'950. "
string(8) "Rooms(s)"
string(1) "3"
string(7) "Surface"
string(4) "93m2"
string(16) "Date of Contract"
string(8) "01.04.17"

answered Feb 25, 2017 at 10:04

ThW

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3 Comments

user7342807 Over a year ago

Thanks so much, this is without a doubt the best answer I found on SO. Just one last question, I have table without <strong> in the second <td> so how can I tell the second xpath evaluate string(td[2]/strong) to add an OR operator to that /strong ?

user7342807 Over a year ago

Just to add, I just added string(td[2]/text() and it gets the content from the <td> without the strong, but not from the the <td> where it has <strong> in it

ThW Over a year ago

It is just string(td[2]). td[2] fetches the second position td. string() casts the first node of the result into a string. That returns all its text content. Including the descendants. td[2]/text() fetches the text child nodes of the second td. Cast the first of them into a string and you will get only that part of the text content.

Ray Hunter · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-24 23:02:27Z

1

Try this out:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($table);
$dom = new \DomXPath($dom);
$result = $dom->query('//table/tr/td/strong');

foreach($result as $item) {
  echo $item->nodeValue . "\n";
}

That will print the element. However, you will probably want to setup your data in a way that you dont have to deal with the html tags like <strong>. You might want to use xml or even json.

answered Feb 24, 2017 at 23:02

Ray Hunter

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4 Comments

user7342807 Over a year ago

is there any regex solution for this? I mean to get the pairs

Quixrick Over a year ago

Not sure why the above answer wouldn't work for you, but with just regex, you could do something like this: regex101.com/r/uDhahb/1 That being said, you should be able to get both the name and the value from the DOMDocument.

Ray Hunter Over a year ago

@user7342807 You could use regex to get the items, but that will be complicated too. The problem with regex is that if the tags change, there could be issues getting to the data properly.

user7342807 Over a year ago

@Quixrick Is there any way to get the values? I only got the keys i.e monthly rent, rooms, surface ... but not the values. Your answer is the only thing that helped me even come close I did, preg_match_all(pattren, html, matches); not sure I am missing something

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