Question

I am parsing an HTML page with DOM and XPath in PHP.

I have to fetch a nested <Table...></table> from the HTML.

I have defined a query using FirePath in the browser which is pointing to

html/body/table[2]/tbody/tr/td[2]/table[2]/tbody/tr/td/table

When I run the code it says DOMNodeList is fetched having length 0. My objective is to spout out the queried <Table> as a string. This is an HTML scraping script in PHP.

Below is the function. Please help me how can I extract the required <table>

$pageUrl = "http://www.boc.cn/sourcedb/whpj/enindex.html";

getExchangeRateTable($pageUrl);


function getExchangeRateTable($url){
    $htmlTable = "";
    $xPathTable = nulll;
    $xPathQuery1 = "html/body/table[2]/tbody/tr/td[2]/table[2]/tbody/tr/td/table";

    if(strlen($url)==0){die('Argument exception: method call [getExchangeRateTable] expects a string of URL!');}

    // initialize objects
    $page = tidyit($url);
    $dom = new DOMDocument();
    $dom->loadHTML($page);
    $xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);

    // $elements is sppearing as DOMNodeList
    $elements = $xpath->query($xPathQuery1);

    // print_r($elements);
    foreach($elements as $e){
        $e->firstChild->nodeValue;  
    }

}

Answer 1

Remove the tbody’s from your XPath query – they are in most cases inserted by your browser, as is with the page you are trying to scrape.

/html/body/table[2]/tr/td[2]/table[2]/tr/td/table

This will most likely work.

However, its probaly more safe to use a different XPath. Following XPath will select the first th based on it’s textual content, then select the tr’s parent – a tbody or table:

//th[contains(text(),'Currency Name')]/parent::tr/parent::*