Home/ Questions/Q 7548019
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-30T09:36:14+00:00

I am trying to find child nodes by a certain class name (divs with

  • 0

I am trying to find child nodes by a certain class name (divs with class name=’foo’) within a loop of DOMDocument nodes. If it exists it should set my foo value to 1:

My HTML $document looks like:

...
<div class="posts">Div Posts 1</div>
<div class="posts">Div Posts 2<div class="foo"></div></div>
<div class="posts">Div Posts 3</div>
<div class="posts">Div Posts 4<div class="foo"></div></div>
<div class="posts">Div Posts 5</div>
...

DOMDocument/Xpath ($document):

$html = array();
$document = new \DOMDocument();
$document->loadHTMLFile($url); // loads html from above
$xpath = new \DOMXPath($document);

$i=0;
foreach ($xpath->query(Parser::cssToXpath('.posts')) as $node) {
    $html['posts'][$i]['content'] = $node->nodeValue;  
    // check if child node with class name 'foo' exists => doesn't work :(
    $children = $node->getElementsByTagName('foo');
    if($children)
        $html['posts'][$i]['foo'] = '1';
    else
        $html['posts'][$i]['foo'] = '0';
    $i++;
}

Output:

[posts] => Array
    (
        [0] => Array
            (
                [content] => Div class Posts 1
                [foo] => 1
            )

        [1] => Array
            (
                [content] => Div class Posts 2
                [foo] => 1
            )

        [2] => Array
            (
                [content] => Div class Posts 3
                [foo] => 1
            )

        [3] => Array
            (
                [content] => Div class Posts 4
                [foo] => 1
            )

        [4] => Array
            (
                [content] => Div class Posts 5
                [foo] => 1
            )

    )

getElementsByTagName() might not be the right method for that, but I tried different methods already and don’t find the right one. 🙁

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    According to your comment

    Hm yes but still doesn’t work unfortunately. Eventually I need to know which .posts div has the child element ‘foo’ because I need to analyze the content of that parent and also need to replace it later

    to the previous answer your predicate is probably:

    a) select div elements
    b) with attribute class=posts
    c) and with a child element div
    d) which has attribute class=foo

    as xpath expression:

    a) //div
    b) //div[ @class=”posts” ]
    c) //div[ @class=”posts” and div ]
    d) //div[ @class=”posts” and div[ @class=”foo” ] ]

    e.g.

    <?php
$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadhtml( getData() );
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);   

/*
use something like
    //div[contains(concat(' ',normalize-space(@class),' '),' post ')]
if the html element may have class="post lalala"
*/
foreach( $xpath->query('//div[@class="posts" and div[@class="foo"]]') as $post) {
    while ( $post->firstChild ) {
        $post->removeChild( $post->firstChild );
    }   
    $post->appendChild( $doc->createElement('span', 'The quick fox....') );
}
echo $doc->savehtml();


function getData() {
    return <<< eoh
<html><head><title>...</title></head><body>
    <div class="posts">Div Posts 1</div>
    <div class="posts">Div Posts 2<div class="foo"></div></div>
    <div class="posts">Div Posts 3</div>
    <div class="posts">Div Posts 4<div class="foo"></div></div>
    <div class="posts">Div Posts 5</div>
</body></html>
eoh;
}

    prints

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
<html><head><title>...</title></head><body>
    <div class="posts">Div Posts 1</div>
    <div class="posts"><span>The quick fox....</span></div>
    <div class="posts">Div Posts 3</div>
    <div class="posts"><span>The quick fox....</span></div>
    <div class="posts">Div Posts 5</div>
</body></html>
    • 0