How can I find text nodes in an HTML snippet?

Question

I'm trying to parse an HTML snippet, using the PHP DOM functions. I have stripped out everything apart from paragraph, span and line break tags, and now I want to retrieve all the text, along with its accompanying styles.

So, I'd like to get each piece of text, one by one, and for each one I can then go back up the tree to get the values of particular attributes (I'm only interested in some specific ones, like color etc.).

How can I do this? Or am I thinking about it the wrong way?

Answer 1

Suppose you have a DOMDocument here:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTMLFile('http://stackoverflow.com/');

You can find all text nodes using a simple Xpath.

$xpath = new DOMXpath($doc);
$textNodes = $xpath->query('//text()');

Just foreach over it to iterate over all textnodes:

foreach ($textNodes as $textNode) {
    echo $textNode->data . "\n";
}

From that, you can go up the DOM tree by using ->parentNode.

Hope that this can give you a good start.