Question

I want to access a custom attribute that I added to some elements in an HTML file, here’s an example of the littleBox="somevalue" attribute

<div id="someId" littleBox="someValue">inner text</div>

The Following doesn’t work:

foreach($html->find('div') as $element){
 echo $element;
 if(isset($element->type)){
 echo $element->littleBox;
   }
}

I saw an article with a similar problem, but I couldn’t replicate it for some reason. Here is what I tried:

function retrieveValue($str){
if (stripos($str, 'littleBox')){//check if element has it
$var=preg_split("/littleBox=\"/",$str);
//echo $var[1];
$var1=preg_split("/\"/",$var[1]);
echo $var1[0];
}
else
return false;
}

When ever I call the retrieveValue() function, nothing happens. Is $element (in the first PHP example above) not a string? I don’t know if I missed something but it’s not returning anything.

Here’s the script in it’s entirety:

<?php
require("../../simplehtmldom/simple_html_dom.php");

if (isset($_POST['submit'])){

$html = file_get_html($_POST['webURL']);

// Find all images 
foreach($html->find('div') as $element){
    echo $element;
   if(isset($element->type)!= false){
    echo retrieveValue($element);
   }
}
}


function retrieveValue($str){
if (stripos($str, 'littleBox')){//check if element has it
$var=preg_split("/littleBox=\"/",$str);
//echo $var[1];
$var1=preg_split("/\"/",$var[1]);
return $var1[0];
}
else
return false;
}

?>

<form method="post">
Website URL<input type="text" name="webURL">
<br />
<input type="submit" name="submit">
</form>

Answer 1

Have you tried:

$html->getElementById("someId")->getAttribute('littleBox');

You could also use SimpleXML:

$html = '<div id="someId" littleBox="someValue">inner text</div>';
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadXML($html);
$div = simplexml_import_dom($dom);
echo $div->attributes()->littleBox;

I would advice against using regex to parse html but shouldn’t this part be like this:

$str = $html->getElementById("someId")->outertext;
$var = preg_split('/littleBox=\"/', $str);
$var1 = preg_split('/\"/',$var[1]);
echo $var1[0];

Also see this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/8851091/1059001