How to return outer html of DOMDocument?

Question

I'm trying to replace video links inside a string - here's my code:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($content);
foreach ($doc->getElementsByTagName("a") as $link) 
{
    $url = $link->getAttribute("href");
    if(strpos($url, ".flv"))
    {
        echo $link->outerHTML();
    }
}

Unfortunately, outerHTML doesn't work when I'm trying to get the html code for the full hyperlink like <a href='http://www.myurl.com/video.flv'></a>

Any ideas how to achieve this?

Answer 1

As of PHP 5.3.6 you can pass a node to saveHtml, e.g.

$domDocument->saveHtml($nodeToGetTheOuterHtmlFrom);

Previous versions of PHP did not implement that possibility. You'd have to use saveXml(), but that would create XML compliant markup. In the case of an <a> element, that shouldn't be an issue though.

See http://blog.gordon-oheim.biz/2011-03-17-The-DOM-Goodie-in-PHP-5.3.6/

Answer 2

You can find a couple of propositions in the users notes of the DOM section of the PHP Manual.

For example, here's one posted by xwisdom :

<?php
// code taken from the Raxan PDI framework
// returns the html content of an element
protected function nodeContent($n, $outer=false) {
    $d = new DOMDocument('1.0');
    $b = $d->importNode($n->cloneNode(true),true);
    $d->appendChild($b); $h = $d->saveHTML();
    // remove outter tags
    if (!$outer) $h = substr($h,strpos($h,'>')+1,-(strlen($n->nodeName)+4));
    return $h;
}
?>