How can I use XPath and DOM to replace a node/element in php?

Question

Say I have the following html

$html = '
<div class="website">
    <div>
        <div id="old_div">
            <p>some text</p>
            <p>some text</p>
            <p>some text</p>
            <p>some text</p>
            <div class="a class">
                <p>some text</p>
                <p>some text</p>
            </div>
        </div>
        <div id="another_div"></div>
    </div>
</div>
';

And I want to replace #old_div with the following:

$replacement = '<div id="new_div">this is new</div>';

To give an end result of:

$html = '
<div class="website">
        <div>
            <div id="new_div">this is new</div>
            <div id="another_div"></div>
        </div>
    </div>
';

Is there an easy cut-and-paste function for doing this with PHP?

---

Final working code thanks to all Gordon's help:

<?php

$html = <<< HTML
<div class="website">
    <div>
        <div id="old_div">
            <p>some text</p>
            <p>some text</p>
            <p>some text</p>
            <p>some text</p>
            <div class="a class">
                <p>some text</p>
                <p>some text</p>
            </div>
        </div>
        <div id="another_div"></div>
    </div>
</div>
HTML;

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadXml($html); // use loadHTML if it's invalid XHTML

//create replacement
$replacement  = $dom->createDocumentFragment();
$replacement  ->appendXML('<div id="new_div">this is new</div>');

//make replacement
$xp = new DOMXPath($dom);
$oldNode = $xp->query('//div[@id="old_div"]')->item(0);
$oldNode->parentNode->replaceChild($replacement  , $oldNode);
//save html output
$new_html = $dom->saveXml($dom->documentElement);

echo $new_html;

?>

Answer 1

Since the answer in the linked duplicate is not that comprehensive, I'll give an example:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadXml($html); // use loadHTML if its invalid (X)HTML

// create the new element
$newNode = $dom->createElement('div', 'this is new');
$newNode->setAttribute('id', 'new_div');

// fetch and replace the old element
$oldNode = $dom->getElementById('old_div');
$oldNode->parentNode->replaceChild($newNode, $oldNode);

// print xml
echo $dom->saveXml($dom->documentElement);

---

Technically, you don't need XPath for this. However, it can happen that your version of libxml cannot do getElementById for non-validated documents (id attributes are special in XML). In that case, replace the call to getElementById with

$xp = new DOMXPath($dom);
$oldNode = $xp->query('//div[@id="old_div"]')->item(0);

Demo on codepad

---

To create a $newNode with child nodes without having to to create and append elements one by one, you can do

$newNode = $dom->createDocumentFragment();
$newNode->appendXML('
<div id="new_div">
    <p>some other text</p>
    <p>some other text</p>
    <p>some other text</p>
    <p>some other text</p>
</div>
');