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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-06T00:15:00+00:00

I tried using the following code for a HTML page, but it doesn’t work.

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I tried using the following code for a HTML page, but it doesn’t work. How do I retrieve and manipulate all outputted HTML elements in one page?

$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->load('http://localhost/foo/index.php');

$items = $doc->getElementsByTagName('img');

foreach ($items as $item) {
    echo $item->nodeValue . "\n";
}

EDIT: 

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$html = 'http://localhost/foo/index.php';
$dom->loadHTML($html);
foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('a') as $node) {
    echo $dom->saveHtml($node), PHP_EOL;

}

The code above outputs nothing

Debugging Code:

<?php

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$html = 'http://localhost/foo/index.php';

var_dump($dom->loadHTML($html));

echo '<br />';

var_dump($dom);

echo '<br />';

var_dump($dom->saveHTML());

echo '<br />';

var_dump($dom->getElementsByTagName('a'));

echo '<br />';

foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('a') as $node) {

    var_dump($node);

    echo '<br />';

    var_dump( $dom->saveHtml($node) );
    echo '<br />';

}

?>

Debugging Result:

bool(true)
object(DOMDocument)#1 (0) { }
string(170) "

http://localhost/foo/index.php
"
object(DOMNodeList)#2 (0) { }
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Some DOMDocument debugging hints.

    If applicable upgrade to the latest PHP 5.4 because it will give you more information on var_dump for DOMDocument and friends.

    I take your small example and will add some hints how to debug the code:

    $dom = new DOMDocument;
$html = 'http://localhost/foo/index.php';
$dom->loadHTML($html);
foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('a') as $node) {
    echo $dom->saveHtml($node), PHP_EOL;
}

    Did the loading work? That is this line:

    $dom->loadHTML($html);

    You can take a look inside the document by outputting it’s content. If you display that in the browser you need to look into the source of your document or you just change the output with htmlspecialchars:

    var_dump(htmlspecialchars($dom->saveHTML()));

    This will give you the documented as loaded in the HTML variant verbatim inside your browser.

    The next part you might want to debug is the result of getElementsByTagName:

    foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('a') as $node) {

    First assign it to a variable, and then check the length if it’s not NULL or FALSE:

    $aTags = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
var_dump(htmlspecialchars($aTags), $aTags->length());

    The length will tell you how many elements were matched.

    Example/Demo:

    <?php

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$html = 'http://localhost/foo/index.php';
$dom->loadHTML($html);
echo 'Document HTML loaded: ', var_dump($dom->saveHTML()), "\n";
$aTags = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
echo 'A Elements found: ', var_dump($aTags->length), "\n";
foreach ($aTags as $node) {
   echo $dom->saveHtml($node), "\n";
}

    Output:

    Document HTML loaded: string(171) "<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
<html><body><p>http://localhost/foo/index.php</p></body></html>
"

A Elements found: int(0)

    Hope this is helpful.

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