Question

I need to add classes to the navigation HTML being output from a function in a custom CMS.

The only way I can get the output I need is to parse the HTML with PHP.

I am using PHP’s DOM methods to look through the HTML and add a class to any <li> element that contains a child <ul> (top level navigation items).

So far it’s working, but I have 2 questions:

1. Is there a more efficient way for me to go through this DOM data? It seems cumbersome to me, but that could just be my lack of experience.

2. In some cases, my <li> elements may already have a class, how can I add to the existing class attribute without destroying what may or may not already be there?

–

    <?
        $mcms_nav = getContent(
            // call to cms that returns navigation html as a string
            // ex. <ul id="pnav"><li><a href="/">home</a></li>....</ul>
        );

        $dom = new DOMDocument();
        $dom->preserveWhiteSpace = FALSE;
        $dom->loadHTML($mcms_nav);


        $x = new DOMXPath($dom);
        foreach($x->query('//ul/li/ul') as $node)
        {
            $parent = $node->parentNode;
            $parent_attr = $dom->createAttribute('class');
            $parent_attr->value = 'has-flyout';
            $parent->appendChild($parent_attr);

            $flyout_attr = $dom->createAttribute('class');
            $flyout_attr->value = 'flyout';
            $node->appendChild($flyout_attr);
        }

        $mcms_nav = $dom->getElementByID('pnav');
        echo $dom->saveHTML($mcms_nav);
    ?>

Answer 1

1. Not really. You could take the XML class from the CakePHP framework, turn this into an array, manipulate the array, and turn it back. Not sure if that’s an option in your case. http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-utility-libraries/xml.html

2. You can use dom->hasAttribute() and dom->getAttribute() to get the existing attribute contents if they exist.

Also, a new job wouldn’t hurt 😉