Question

How do I turn the output into a variable so i can cross reference it to see if it matches another variable I have set

foreach ($nodes as $i => $node) {
  echo $node->nodeValue;
}

I know this is incorrect and wouldn’t work but:

foreach ($nodes as $i => $node) {
  $target = $node->nodeValue;
}

$match = "some text"

if($target == $match) {
  // Match - Do Something
} else {
  // No Match - Do Nothing
}

Actually this solves my question but maybe not the right way about it:

libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$dom = new DomDocument;
$dom->loadHTMLFile("http://www.example.com");
$xpath = new DomXPath($dom);
$nodes = $xpath->query("(//tr/td/a/span[@class='newprodtext' and contains(translate(text(), 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'), 'adidas')])[1]");
foreach ($nodes as $i => $node) {

echo $node->nodeValue, "\n";
$target[0] = $node->nodeValue;
}

$match = "adidas";

if($target == $match) {
    // Match
} else {
    // No Match
}

Answer 1

Your problem is more about general understanding of loops, assigning values to arrays and using if conditionals with php than using xpath.

• In your foreach loop, you’re assigning each $node‘s nodeValue to the same index in your $target array, $target will always have only one value (the last one)
• In your if conditional statement, you’re comparing an array (or null if $nodes has no items, so you probably want to declare $target first) against the string ‘adidas’, that will never be true.

You probably want to do something like:

$matched = false;
$match = 'adidas';
foreach ($nodes as $i => $node) {
    $nodeValue = trim(strip_tags($node->textContent));
    if ($nodeValue === $match) {
        $matched = true;
        break;
    }
}

if ($matched) {
    // Match
} else {
    // No Match
}

Update

I see that this xpath expression was given to you in another answer, that presumably already does the matching, so you just need to check the length property of $nodes

if ($nodes->length > 0) {
    // Match
} else {
    // No match
}