Recently our development team needed to find a way to manipulate the body of an article and return JSON objects of all the body content. This was because of the constraints of the Apple News Publishing Format, which ϳԹ recently joined. We needed to separate almost all HTML elements into their own individual component/object. As you can imagine, trying to write custom code to parse the body would’ve taken a long time and would’ve never captured all the permutations. After doing some research, we learned we were able to use to manipulate our body HTML content to solve the separation-of-HTML-elements problem.
What Is , and When Is It Used?
The DOMDocument is a class built in to PHP that helps developers navigate an HTML document tree and provides methods to help interact with the document. If you ever need to parse HTML content or manipulate HTML content using PHP, DOMDocument can help you quickly and easily access nodes.
Getting Started
At ϳԹ, one thing we pride ourselves on is finding and sharing the best gear available. Today, we’re going to take a gear article and do a simple count of how many links are inside the body. DOMDocument is fairly easy to set up, and from there, you can manipulate it to your specific scenario.
View the article here: Upgrade Your Gear Closet with These 10 Great Deals
Here is a copy of the HTML content for your own testing purposes
Loading the Document
-
Initialize the DOMDocument()
$dom = new DOMDocument();
-
Load our HTML into the $dom object.
$dz->Dzղѳ($ǻ);
Retrieving Elements by Tag
1. With our HTML now loaded into the DOMDocument() object, we can use the method getElementsByTagName() which exists in the DOMDocument class, to get all elements with a link.
$links = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
2. For this specific example, all we need to do is get the number of links. The method getElementsByTagName() returns a DOMNodeList, so we use the length method on DOMNodeList to get the number of links.
$body = HTML_CODE_HERE;
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($body);
$links = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
$num_links = $links->length;
print($num_links); // 21
Excluding Certain Elements in a Tag
3. If you take a look at the article and the HTML, you will see that we have 2 types of links. We have regular links within text but we also have links with a class of btn. The btn links have a button style to them.
4. Next, we’re going to loop through all of the links so we can iterate on each one. Simple enough:
foreach ($links as $link) {
}
5. There then exists a method getAttribute() on DOMDocument to get the class attribute:
foreach ($links as $link) {
$link_class = $link->getAttribute('class');
}
6. Our next step is to check if the class of btn exists on the link.
foreach ($links as $link) {
$link_class = $link->getAttribute('class');
if (strpos('btn', $link_class) !== FALSE) {
$num_btns++;
}
}
7. The above code looks correct, but if you look at the HTML, you’ll notice that some links don't contain a class on them. PHP will throw a WARNING because of this. Let's fix that.
foreach ($links as $link) {
$link_class = $link->getAttribute('class');
if (!empty($link_class) && strpos('btn', $link_class) !== FALSE) {
$num_btns++;
}
}
8. The last thing we haven't done is initialize $num_btns:
$num_btns = 0;
foreach ($links as $link) {
$link_class = $link->getAttribute('class');
if (!empty($link_class) && strpos('btn', $link_class) !== FALSE) {
$num_btns++;
}
}
print($num_btns); // 10
9. Great work! As you can see, manipulating HTML can be fairly easy with DOMDocument.
Adding Elements
10. DOMDocument can be used for more than document traversal. You can also create new elements and append them to the current HTML.
11. Let's say we want to add a link to the bottom of this page that points to all of our gear articles. We can create a link element using the createElement method!
$gear = $dom->createElement('a', "Check out our Gear Channel");
$gear->setAttribute('href', "/outdoor-gear");
12. After we've created our element, all we need to do now is add it to the $dom. The createElement function creates a new instance of the DOMElement, in this case a link, but it will not show up in the document unless it is properly inserted. In that case, we must use the appendChild() function to get it to appear. See the for reference.
$dom->appendChild($gear);
13. Here is the full code for adding a link to our HTML:
$gear = $dom->createElement('a', "Check out our Gear Channel");
$gear->setAttribute('href', '/outdoor-gear');
$dom->appendChild($gear);
print($dom->ٱٰDzԳٱԳ);
Recap
PHP's DOMDocument() class makes it very easy for developers to traverse and manipulate any HTML content. There exist many other methods in the class that can prove useful to you: getEelemntsByTagName, createAttribute, createTextNode, and createCDATASection just to name a few. No need to any extra libraries or modules, it's all built right in!
To learn more, visit the .
Body Copy:
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