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Asked: 2026-05-26T13:02:23+00:00

I’m importing some arbitrary HTML into a DOMDocument using the loadHTML() function, eg.: $html

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I’m importing some arbitrary HTML into a DOMDocument using the loadHTML() function, eg.:

$html = '<p><a href="test.php">Test</a></p>';
$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->loadHTML($html);

I then want to change a few attributes/node values using DOMDocument methods which I can do no problem.

Once I’ve made these changes I’d like to export the HTML string (using ->saveHTML()), without the <html><body>... tags that the DOMDocument automatically adds to the HTML.

I understand why these are added (to ensure a valid document), but how would I go about just getting my edited HTML back (essentially everything between the <body> tags)?

I have read this post and while it offers some solutions I would rather do this ‘properly’, i.e. without using a string replace on the <body> tags. Validity of the HTML is not an issue as it’s run through an HTML purifier before hand.

Any ideas? Thanks.

EDIT

I’m aware of the $node parameter added to saveHTML() in PHP 5.3.6, unfortunately I’m stuck with 5.2.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Perhaps the source code of this will help – They’re using a regex to strip out the unnecessary strings:

    http://beerpla.net/projects/smartdomdocument-a-smarter-php-domdocument-class/

    $content = preg_replace(array("/^\<\!DOCTYPE.*?<html><body>/si",
                                  "!</body></html>$!si"),
                            "",
                            $this->saveHTML());

return $content;

    saveHTMLExact() – DOMDocument has an extremely badly designed “feature” where if the HTML code you are loading does not contain <html> and <body> tags, it adds them automatically (yup, there are no flags to turn this behavior off).

    Thus, when you call $doc->saveHTML(), your newly saved content now has <html><body> and DOCTYPE in it. Not very handy when trying to work with code fragments (XML has a similar problem).

    SmartDOMDocument contains a new function called saveHTMLExact() which does exactly what you would want – it saves HTML without adding that extra garbage that DOMDocument does.

    Also, other questions have asked similar things:

    How to saveHTML of DOMDocument without HTML wrapper?

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