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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T18:49:04+00:00

I see lots of php libraries that can parse html. A nice example is

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I see lots of php libraries that can parse html. A nice example is QueryPath which mimics the Jquery Api.

However, I am looking to analyse phtml. So, not only would the library be good at analysing the DOM, but also be good at analysing the php processing instructions. e.g The Php Document Object Model or PDOM.

A document like this:

<?php
require 'NameFinder.php';
$title = 'Wave Hello';
$name = getName();
?><html>
<head>
<title><?php echo $title ?></title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello <?php echo $name ?></h1>
<p>Blah Blah Blah</p>
</body>

I’d like to be able to use this kind of php library to read things like:

  • the inner html of a DOM node, found by xpath or css selector.

as well possibly offering things like:

  • a list of php functions/method invoked in the script
  • values of php variables
  • pages required by that page
  • a list of php variables used before line 5
  • a list of php variables used before the 1st para of the body element

I could spend some time peicing something together, borrowing code from things like phpdocumentor and Zend Framework Reflection, using the in-built DOM Api, introspection and string manipulation, etc.

But, if there is some kind of *phtmlQuery” library out there that can do these kinds of things then it will handy.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    To get the processing instructions (and other nodes) from your files, you can use DOM and XPath:

    $dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTMLFile('/path/to/your/file/or/url');
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
foreach ($xpath->query('//processing-instruction()') as $pi) {
    echo $dom->saveHTML($pi), PHP_EOL;
}

    This will output:

    <?php require 'NameFinder.php';
$title = 'Wave Hello';
$name = getName();
?>
<?php echo $title ?>
<?php echo $name ?>

    This will work with broken HTML. You can find additional libraries at

    Once you got the processing instructions, you can either run them through the native Tokenizer or try some of these:

    Those won’t magically give you the information you seek out of the box, so you will likely need to write a few additional lines on your own.

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