Question

I have just learned about XPath and I am wanting to read data from only certain columns in a table.

My current code looks like this:

<?php

$file_contents = file_get_contents('test.html');

$dom_document = new DOMDocument();

$dom_document->loadHTML($file_contents);

//use DOMXpath to navigate the html with the DOM
$dom_xpath = new DOMXpath($dom_document);

$elements = $dom_xpath->query("//tr[@class='rowstyle']");

if (!is_null($elements)) {
    foreach ($elements as $element) 
    {
        echo $element->nodeValue . '<br />';
    }
}
else
{
    echo 'none';
}

?>

Also a variation in the query because through my research I have seen lots of issues with nest table elements but it produces the same result:

$elements = $dom_xpath->query("//table[@class='tablestyle']/tbody/tr[@class='rowstyle']");

It does grab the row of data but it makes into a single string, combining all of the cells into one string and making the tags disappear.

What I really want to do is separate those cells and grab the certain row number.

I am also curious on how to find out which version of XPath I have… My PHP version is 5.3.5

Answer 1

Its not combining those cells… youre outputting the nodeValue which in this case is behaving like innerHTML. IF you want to work on the cells themselves the either use childNodes or a xpah query using the row as the context, then loop over the cells.

Example:

$dom_xpath = new DOMXpath($dom_document);

$elements = $dom_xpath->query("//tr[@class='rowstyle']");
foreach ($elements as $element) 
{
  foreach($element->childNodes as $cell) {
     echo $cell->nodeValue . '<br />';
  }

}