PHP DOM getElementById

Yes, I can do this with SimpleXML, but for what I'm ultimately going to try to do getElementById with PHP DOM will work a lot better.

I'm trying to do the tutorial here:

http://theserverpages.com/php/manual/en/function.dom-domdocument-getelementbyid.php

but it doesn't say what the code for book.xml should be, and it seems to me like I'm writing it wrong.

Here is how I would go about this...

<?php // RAY_simplexml_9.php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
echo "<pre>";
 
// TEST DATA FROM THE OP
$xml = '
  <books>
  TEST BOOK
  </books>';
 
// MAKE AN OBJECT
$obj = SimpleXML_Load_String($xml);
 
// VISUALIZE THE DATA IN OBJECT FORM
var_dump($obj);
 
// PROVIDE A WRAPPER SO WE CAN DO THIS THE RIGHT WAY
$valid_xml = '<rezults>' . $xml . '</rezults>';
$valid_obj = SimpleXML_Load_String($valid_xml);
 
// SHOW THE DATA VALUE
echo (string)$valid_obj->books;
                                              

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I appreciate your response, but I already know how to use SimpleXML for that particular purpose.  What I'm trying to do though is be able to grab the information in both HTML and XML files with php based on their element ID tag.

First, you must have id attributes in the xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<books>
  <book id="books">TEST BOOK</book>
  <book id="books2">TEST BOOK2</book>
</books>

Second, you need to identify the id attributes. It can be done like this:

$doc = new DomDocument("1.0");
 
// We need to validate our document before refering to the id
$doc->validateOnParse = true;
$doc->Load('book.xml');
 
// define id attributes
foreach($doc->getElementsByTagName('book') as $book)
  $book->setIdAttribute('id',true);
 
echo "The element whose id is books is: " . $doc->getElementById('books')->tagName . "\n";

                                              

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If I wanted to change book.xml to book.html, what would the html file look like?  Or would I need to change the php code?

CXR- Also, the above example returns
The element whose id is books is: book.

Is there a way to have it return TEST BOOK or TEST BOOK2

P.S. Thank you.

what the code for book.xml - Yeah, I've been wondering about that myself!

Maybe this will be helpful.

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php#91072

Also, you might want getElementsByTagName instead of looking for the ID.

>> Is there a way to have it return TEST BOOK or TEST BOOK2

Use the "nodeValue" property:

http://php.net/manual/en/class.domnode.php#domnode.props.nodevalue

echo $doc->getElementById('books')->nodeValue;

                                              

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That's working really well.  I tried using an .html file, instead of an .xml, and it works fine (I'm swapping xml text in for html text).

The issue I'm having though is if there are any links or inner divs inside, it seems that this won't work if there are any interior <> .  Is there a way to to make it work with <>?

CXR -

This line appears to be causing some problems:
foreach($doc->getElementsByTagName('book') as $book)
  $book->setIdAttribute('id',true);


But I can't seem to get it to work without that line.  However, the example provided by the php manual does not have it?

<?php
 
$doc = new DomDocument;
 
// We need to validate our document before refering to the id
$doc->validateOnParse = true;
$doc->Load('book.xml');
 
echo "The element whose id is books is: " . $doc->getElementById('books')->tagName . "\n";
 
?> 

                                              

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The example in the manual does not work for me either. This excerpt from the manual gives a hint, though:

" For this function to work, you will need either to set some ID attributes with DOMElement::setIdAttribute  or a DTD which
  defines an attribute to be of type ID. In the later case, you will need to validate your document with
  DOMDocument::validate or DOMDocument->validateOnParse before using this function. "

http://php.net/manual/en/domdocument.getelementbyid.php

The book.xml used in the manual probably has a DTD, that is why validateOnParse is set to true in the example. Without a DTD, you need to use setIdAttribute() if you are going to use getElementById().

So, basically, this won't work for parsing html then?

Depends on the html... it should work for valid xhtml (which also is xml), but will probably not work well with malformed "quirks mode" html, which is what you most often will find on the net.

Can you show me an example of this grabbing an element by id from an XHTML file?

The challenge is to find a valid xhtml page... ;)

Try this:

$doc = new DomDocument;
$doc->resolveExternals = true;
$doc->Load('http://www.w3.org/');
echo "The element whose id is slogan is: " . $doc->getElementById('slogan')->tagName . "<br />\n";
var_dump($doc->getElementById('slogan')->nodeValue);
                                              

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That worked fine.  Then I tried to copy and paste the source code from www.w3.org into a file called "test.html", and put it in the same folder as my php code, and I got:
The element whose id is slogan is:
NULL

<?php
 
$doc = new DomDocument;
$doc->resolveExternals = true;
$doc->Load('test.html');
echo "The element whose id is slogan is: " . $doc->getElementById('slogan')->tagName . "<br />\n";
var_dump($doc->getElementById('slogan')->nodeValue);
 
?>

                                              

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Ignore my last comment, I made a mistake.

This seems to work really well, but it only returns text.  For example, the id logo returns blank.  Is there a way to get it to return

<img alt="The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)" height="48" width="315" src="/Icons/w3c_main" />

Or include linlks for example, rather than just straight text.

The element with id=logo is a h1 element, and it contains an img element.

To get the child element of the h1 element, you can use the firstChild property. To extract an element as a string, you can use the saveXML() method of the DOMDocument object. To see the string in a html context, you must use htmlentities().

Try this:

$doc = new DomDocument;
$doc->resolveExternals = true;
$doc->Load('http://www.w3.org/');
echo "The element whose id is logo is: " . $doc->getElementById('logo')->tagName . "<br />\n";
$logo = $doc->getElementById('logo');
$img = $doc->saveXML($logo->firstChild);
echo htmlentities($img);
                                              

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>> Or include linlks for example, rather than just straight text.

What do you mean?

If you had an h1 tag that looked like this:

<h1 id="logo">This is a <a href="link.html">link</a> test</h1>

And you wanted to grab

This is a <a href="link.html">link</a> test

The worked well.  I tried to incorporate it into a search and replace, where the header is replaced by text from an .xml file.  This works really well, EXCEPT, if there is a link.  

So this

<h1 id="logo">This is a link test</h1>

Will get changed, but this won't

<h1 id="logo">This is a <a href="link.html">link</a> test</h1>

Even though they both output with the echo statement fine.

<?php
 
$docx = new DomDocument("1.0");
 
// We need to validate our document before refering to the id
$docx->validateOnParse = true;
$docx->Load('book.xml');
 
// define id attributes
foreach($docx->getElementsByTagName('div') as $bookx)
  $bookx->setIdAttribute('id',true);
 
$desired_content = $docx->getElementById('books')->nodeValue;
 
$outputfile = 'output.html';
$url = 'test.html';
$content = file_get_contents($url);
$between = '';
 
$doc = new DomDocument;
$doc->resolveExternals = true;
$doc->Load('test.html');
$logo = $doc->getElementById('logo');
foreach($logo->childNodes as $o) {
  $s = $doc->saveXML($o);
  $between = $between.$s; 
}
$output = str_replace($between, $desired_content, $content);
echo $between;
$fh = fopen($outputfile, 'w') or die("Can't open file the output file");
fwrite($fh, $output);
fclose($fh);
?>
                                              

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Typo on like 28.  Code should have read like this

<?php
$docx = new DomDocument("1.0");
 
// We need to validate our document before refering to the id
$docx->validateOnParse = true;
$docx->Load('book.xml');
 
// define id attributes
foreach($docx->getElementsByTagName('div') as $bookx)
  $bookx->setIdAttribute('id',true);
 
 $desired_content = $docx->getElementById('books')->nodeValue;
 
$outputfile = 'output.html';
$url = 'test.html';
$content = file_get_contents($url);
$between = '';
 
$doc = new DomDocument;
$doc->resolveExternals = true;
$doc->Load('test.html');
$logo = $doc->getElementById('logo');
foreach($logo->childNodes as $o) {
  $s = $doc->saveXML($o);
  $between = $between.$s;
}
$output = str_replace($desired_content, $between, $content);
echo $between;
$fh = fopen($outputfile, 'w') or die("Can't open file the output file");
fwrite($fh, $output);
fclose($fh);
?>
                                              

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It seems to me the first version was correct... the syntax for str_replace is:

str_replace  ( mixed $search  , mixed $replace  , mixed $subject  [, int &$count  ] )

The string to search for comes first, and the string to insert comes second.

If you can't figure it out, please open a new question. This question was about using getElementById(). Thank you! :)

Btw, I said earlier that malformed html would not work well, I forgot about this method:

http://php.net/manual/en/domdocument.loadhtmlfile.php