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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-09T02:17:08+00:00

Consider a document in the following format: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title></title> <body> <div

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Consider a document in the following format:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<body>
   <div class="blog_post_item first">
       <?php // some child elements ?>
   </div><!-- end blog_post_item -->
</body>
</html>

I am loading a document like this from one domain to another with PHP cURL. I would like to trim my cURL result to only include div.blog_post_item.first and its children. I know the structure of the other page, yet I can’t edit it. I imagine I can use preg_match to find the opening and closing tags; they will always look the same, including that ending comment.

I have searched for examples/tutorials of screen scraping with cURL/XPath/XSLT/whatever, and its mostly a cyclical rattling off of names of HTML parsing libraries. For that reason, please provide a simple working example. Please do not simply explain that parsing HTML with regex is a potential security vulnerability. Please do not just list libraries and specifications that I should read further into.

I have some simple PHP cURL code:

$ch = curl_init("http://a.web.page.com");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Of course, now $output contains the entire source. How will I get just the contents of that element?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you are sure about the following structure:

    <div class="blog_post_item first">
   WHATEVER
</div><!-- end blog_post_item -->

    AND you are sure the ending-code doesn’t appear in WHATEVER, then you can simply grab it.

    (Note please that I replaced your original PHP with WHATEVER. CURL will only fetch the HTML, and it will contain content, not PHP.)

    You don’t need a regex. You can also do it simply by searching for the wanted strings, like in my example below.

    $curlResponse = '
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<body>
   <div class="blog_post_item first">
       <?php // some child elements ?>
   </div><!-- end blog_post_item -->
</body>
</html>';

$startStr = '<div class="blog_post_item first">';
$endStr = '</div><!-- end blog_post_item -->';

$startStrPos = strpos($curlResponse, $startStr)+strlen($startStr);
$endStrPos = strpos($curlResponse, $endStr);

$wanted = substr($curlResponse, $startStrPos, $endStrPos-$startStrPos );

echo htmlentities($wanted);
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