Question

I’ve been recently playing with DOMXpath in PHP and had success with it, trying to get more experience with it I’ve been playing grabbing certain elements of different sites. I am having trouble getting the weather marker off of http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weather/cape0005 this website.

Specifically I want

//*[@id='theTemperature']

Here is what I have

$url = file_get_contents('http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weather/cape0005');

$dom   = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($url);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$tags  = $xpath->query("//*[@id='theTemperature']");
foreach ($tags as $tag){
    echo $tag->nodeValue;
}

Is there something I am doing wrong here? I am able to produce actual results on other tags on the page but specifically not this one.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

what happens is straightforward, the page contains an empty id=”theTemperature” element which is a placeholder to be populated with javascript. file_get_contents() will just download the page, not executing javascript, so the element remains empty. Try to load the page in the browser with javascript disabled to see it yourself