Question

I need to get all of the text contained between a specific div. In the following example I want to get everything between the div with class name “st” :

<div class="title">This is a title</div>
<div class="st">Some example <em>text</em> here.</div>
<div class="footer">Footer text</div>

So the result would be

Some example <em>text</em> here.

or even just

Some example text here.

Does anyone know how to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Server-side in PHP

A very basic way would be something like this:

$data = ''; // your HTML data from the question
preg_match( '/<div class="\st\">(.*?)<\/div>/', $data, $match );

Then iterate the $match object. However, this could return bad data if your .st DIV has another DIV inside it.

A more proper way would be:

function getData()
{
    $dom = new DOMDocument;
    $dom -> loadHTML( $data );
    $divs = $dom -> getElementsByTagName('div');

    foreach ( $divs as $div )
    {
        if ( $div -> hasAttribute('class') && strpos( $div -> getAttribute('class'), 'st' ) !== false )
        {
            return $div -> nodeValue;
        }
    }
}

Client-side

If you’re using jQuery, it would be easy like this:

$('.st').text();

or

$('.st').html();

If you’re using plain JavaScript, it would be a little complicated cause you’ll have to check all DIV elements until you find the one with your desired CSS class:

function foo()
{
    var divs = document.getElementsByTagName('div'), i;

    for (i in divs)
    {
        if (divs[i].className.indexOf('st') > -1)
        {
            return divs[i].innerHTML;
        }
    }
}