Question

I got a table as DOMDocument which looks like this:

 name   | user      | comment
 -----------------------------
 Test   | user1     | Line 1
 Abc    | user2     | Line 1
        |           | Line 2
 Test2  | user3     | Line 1
 Test3  | user3     | Line 1
        |           | Line 2
        |           | Line 3

as you can see, sometimes the comment Wraps over multiple tablerows. (Apparently when the comment is a long one)
When those wraps occur, all fields except for the comment one are empty.

How can I merge those wrapped comments together and output them?

I am currently outputting them like this:

foreach ($xml->getElementsByTagName('table')->item(1)->getElementsByTagName('tr') as $row) {
        echo "<tr>";
        foreach ($row->getElementsByTagName('td') as $column) {
            echo "<td>" . $column->textContent . "</td>";
        }
        echo "</tr>";
    }
}

Answer 1

You are outputting each row before you know what the next one contains. A different approach would be to store each row in an array, allowing you to correct the previous row if the following row meets a certain condition (eg. wrapping). You can then output the resulting array as an HTML table once processed.

Something like this (untested):

// build array
$rows = array();
$xmlRows = $xml->getElementsByTagName('table')->item(1)->getElementsByTagName('tr');
foreach ($xmlRows as $xmlRow) {
    $emptyFields = 0;
    $row = array();
    $xmlColumns = $xmlRow->getElementsByTagName('td');
    foreach ($xmlColumns as $xmlColumn) {
        if (empty($xmlColumn->textContent)) { // count empty fields
            $emptyFields++;
        }
        $row[] = $xmlColumn->textContent;
    }
    if ($emptyFields >= 2) { // detect if wrapping has occurred
        $lastRow = array_pop($rows); // remove last row from array
        $lastRow[2] .= $row[2]; // update last row with wrapped data
        $row = $lastRow; // use newly merged row
    }
    $rows[] = $row;
}
// output array
foreach ($rows as &$row) {
    $row = '<td>' . implode('</td><td>', $row) . '</td>';
}
echo '<table><tr>' . implode('</tr><tr>', $rows) . '</tr></table>';