Question

I use the following php code to get a random amount of URL’s form an xpath query:

@$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML( $rawPage );
@$xpath = new DOMXPath( $dom );
@$itemCells = $xpath->query( "//td[@width=120]/a" );

I need to pick a url randomly from that pool so I can visit it via cURL.

What I would like to do is get the count of how many URL’s are found so I can use that as the max in a rand( 0 , $itemCells->length )

However it tells me that $itemCell Cannot use object of type DOMNodeList as array and that my rand() rand() expects parameter 2 to be long, object given

Perhaps there is a better way to go about this.

Answer 1

I suspect that since $length is a readonly property, you’d run into trouble passing it to a function. So, the solution is to save the $length value from a DOMNodeList to a local variable first, then call rand(), like so:

$max = $itemCells->length; 
$rand = rand( 0, $max);

Then you should be able to do this to grab a random node from the list:

$random_node = $itemCells->item( $rand);

And from there, to grab the URL, you would do:

$url = $random_node->attributes->getNamedItem("href")->nodeValue;