Question

I am trying to read the source code of a page. I just want to read some text that is within a certain division element with the id “wrapper_left”.

My problem is that if a prime ” is used in the first argument of the explode function, it does not work. I tried escaping the string, although I figured this wouldn’t do anything.

$source_code = htmlspecialchars(file_get_contents('http://mydomain.com'));

$source_code = explode('<div id="wrapper_left">', $source_code);

echo $source_code[1];

Thanks tons in advance.

Answer 1

Don’t bother trying to get this done with explode(), string manipulation, or a regular expression, you need an HTML parser, like DOMDocument:

$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadHTMLFile( 'http://mydomain.com');

$xpath = new DOMXPath( $doc);
$div = $xpath->query( '//div[@id="wrapper_left"]')->item(0);
echo $div->textContent;

You can see it working in this demo, which, when fed this HTML:

<div id="wrapper_left">Some text</div>

It produces:

Some text