I’ve been trying to do some simple DOM parsing of HTML documents and am really shocked at how difficult it is to do.
I’ve looked into some of the many alternatives to PHP’s DOM classes (like simple xml parser and simple HTML DOM). I found a very effective dom2array function too, which is useful for extremely basic parsing where you just want raw values of elements.
None of these alternatives is really compelling though.
PHP documentation of the DOM is typically lacking in detail and largely useless. A lot of the comments are actually really helpful though.
The tutorials I’ve found online typically cover only the very very basics like writing a 20 line XML document or parsing all the p tags in a document. Meh.
Are there any sites (or books) that go into detail specifically on working with the DOM using PHP’s DOM libraries?
I should have titled my post, “Easiest way to parse HTML DOM in PHP”. ‘Easiest’ is not a very good word, I know. It’s all relative to what you’re trying to do. What I’m doing is pretty straight-forward. I want to parse standalone HTML documents and present the content in a different context.
These are the things I wanted to do:
I ended up going with Simple HTML DOM Parser
It has a very small learning curve and gives easy read/write access to the DOM. End of story. It does seem to choke on nested elements sometimes though.