Question

I have the following script that works almost fine except two things:

• I still have unknows tags such as <note>, <to>, or <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
• I also have javascript script, i’ve tried to exclude them with //text()[not(self::script)] but this breaks the xpath

Script:

$contents = file_get_contents("http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_xml_dom.asp");
$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($contents);
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
// see http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/xpath_syntax.asp
$hrefs = $xpath->evaluate("//text()");
for ($i = 0; $i < $hrefs->length; $i++)
  echo $hrefs->item($i)->nodeValue;

Do you have a better solution to extract text from a webpage ?

Note: I could simply use strip_tags, but I want to stick with DOMDocument.

Answer 1

I’ve always used this http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/ and every time with success.