Searching an HTML document in PHP

Question

I'm trying to use DOMDocument and XPath to search an HTML document using PHP. I want to search by a number such as '022222', and it should return the value of the corresponding h2 tag. Any thoughts on how this would be done?

The HTML document can be found at http://pastie.org/1211369

Answer 1

How about this?

$sxml = simplexml_load_string($data);
$find = "022222";

print_r($sxml->xpath("//li[.='".$find."']/../../../div[@class='content']/h2"));

It returns:

Array
(
    [0] => SimpleXMLElement Object
        (
            [0] => Item 2
        )

)

//li[.='xxx'] will locate the li your searching for. Then we use ../ to step up three levels, before we descend into the content-div, as specified by div[@class='content']. Finally we choose the h2 child.

Just FYI, here's how to do it using DOM:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXML($data);

$find = "022222";

$xpath = new DOMXpath($dom);
$res = $xpath->evaluate("//li[.='".$find."']/../../../div[@class='content']/h2");

if ($res->length > 0) {
    $node = $res->item(0);
    echo $node->firstChild->wholeText."\n";
}