Question

I’m having difficulty using parentNode with DomXpath.

<?php 
$html = <<<STR
        <div id="bar">
            <p>item1</p>
            <ul>
                <li class="foo">item2</li>
                <li>item3</li>
                <li>item4</li>
            </ul>
        </div>
STR;
$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadHTML( $html );
$xpath = new DomXpath($doc);
$nodeFoo = $xpath->query("//*[@id='bar']//*[@class='foo']"); 
echo $nodeFoo->item(0)->nodeValue;

$nodeClimb = $nodeFoo->parentNode; // causes an error
echo $nodeClimb.nodeName;
?>

I expected that the last line yields ‘ul’ which is the parent node name of the retrieved node, $nodeFoo. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Firstly, you have a typo on your last line: echo $nodeClimb.nodeName; should be echo $nodeClimb->nodeName;

However, your main problem is something that you’ve spotted on one line but not on the next: the XPath query returns not a single DOMNode, but an instance of DOMNodeList containing all the matches for that query.

So just as you have selected the first item in the list to echo (echo $nodeFoo->item(0)->nodeValue;), you need to select an item to assign as the parent ($nodeClimb = $nodeFoo->item(0)->parentNode;).