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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T22:21:54+00:00

I try to use SimpleXML in combination with XPath to find nodes which contain

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I try to use SimpleXML in combination with XPath to find nodes which contain a certain string.

<?php
$xhtml = <<<EOC
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="de" lang="de">
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
        <title>Test</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <p>Find me!</p>
        <p>
            <br />
            Find me!
            <br />
        </p>
    </body>
</html>
EOC;

$xml = simplexml_load_string($xhtml);
$xml->registerXPathNamespace('xhtml', 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml');

$nodes = $xml->xpath("//*[contains(text(), 'Find me')]");

echo count($nodes);

Expected output: 2
Actual output: 1

When I change the xhtml of the second paragraph to

<p>
    Find me!
    <br />
 </p>

then it works like expected. How has my XPath expression has to look like to match all nodes containing ‘Find me’ no matter where they are?

Using PHP’s DOM-XML is an option, but not desired.

Thank’s in advance!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It depends on what you want to do. You could select all the <p/> elements that contain “Find me” in any of their descendants with

    //xhtml:p[contains(., 'Find me')]

    This will return duplicates and so you don’t specify the kind of nodes then it will return <body/> and <html/> as well.

    Or perhaps you want any node which has a child (not a descendant) text node that contains “Find me”

    //*[text()[contains(., 'Find me')]]

    This one will not return <html/> or <body/>.

    I forgot to mention that . represents the whole text content of a node. text() is used to retrieve [a nodeset of] text nodes. The problem with your expression contains(text(), 'Find me') is that contains() only works on strings, not nodesets and therefore it converts text() to the value of the first node, which is why removing the first <br/> makes it work.

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