how to keep <br/> tags when using Dom in php to parse html document?

Question

i use dom in php to retrieve a div's content by $node->nodeValue. This div has many <br/> tags in its content, but after i store it in the database and output it in the browser, all the <br/> tags are changed to the whitespace. I want to keep the <br/> tags, how do i achieve that?

Answer 1

nodeValue returns only the text-data (if used on element-nodes). Retrieve the contents using saveXML()

$node->ownerDocument->saveXML($node);

Answer 2

DOMNode::nodeValue will only return the text content.

As <br /> is a child element, it won't be returned.

Your best bet is to

1. Create an empty, temporary string
2. Loop over all the child nodes in your $node
3. Get the markup of each child node using DOMDocument::saveHTML()
4. Concatenate this string with your temp one
5. Save the temp string to the database

Something like this - http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.dom.php#89718