Question

I would like to parse the following id: date

How would I select it? I know how to select a class but I have had no luck for an id.

This is what I did with classes:

$xml->xpath('//*[@class="date"]'); 

I tried switching @class for @id but no luck. What am I doing wrong?

Thank you in advance

@$doc=new DOMDocument();
@$doc->loadHTML($html5);

$xml=simplexml_import_dom($doc);
$images=$xml->xpath('//*[@id="date"]'); 
$arr= array();
foreach ($images as $img) {
  $arr[]= $img;
}

echo $arr[0];

Answer 1

Now that you made me feel bad …

The xpath query below will retrieve all elements that have the attribute id = date. Since you only care about the first one (there shouldn’t be more than one because ID attributes are supposed to be unique … but you never know), you need to reference item(0) in the DOMNodeList returned by the xpath query.

$xml = '<root><p>element we don\'t care about</p><p id="date">date element text</p></root>';
$doc = new DomDocument;
$doc->loadXML($xml);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
if ($el = $xpath->query("//*[@id='date']")->item(0)) {
  echo $el->nodeValue; // outputs: date element text
} else {
  echo 'no elements exist in the xml with an "id" attribute';
}

Hope that helps.