Question

I’ve searched around for solutions to this question, but each one i find, and try doesn’t work.

I’m trying to grab the content of a div from a forum topic.

I’ve tried using preg_match and that only displayed “Array” then I tried using this method

$html = file_get_contents("http://www.lcs-server.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,$id_topic");
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$element = $dom->getElementById("msg_$id_msg");
var_dump($element);

This will show “object(DOMElement)#1 (0) { } “

The $id_topic and $id_msg are defined above this code, taken from the forum database. I did try taking the message from the forum database, but it displayed BB code tags, I’d like it to grab the post content, and display it in HTML, as it’s displayed on the forum post itself.

This is the code I’m using now and giving me “Fatal error: Cannot redeclare DOMinnerHTML()”

$html = file_get_contents("http://www.lcs-server.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,$id_topic");

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$domelement = $dom->getElementById("msg_$id_msg");

foreach ($domelement as $element) 
{ 
    echo DOMinnerHTML($element); 
} 

function DOMinnerHTML($DOMelement) 
{ 
$innerHTML = ""; 
    $children = $DOMelement->childNodes; 
    foreach ($children as $child) 
    { 
            $tmp_dom = new DOMDocument(); 
        $tmp_dom->appendChild($tmp_dom->importNode($child, true)); 
        $innerHTML.=trim($tmp_dom->saveHTML()); 
    } 
        return $innerHTML; 
    }

Answer 1

getElementById returns a DOM node object. It does not return the HTML of the node. For that, you have to get the node’s “innerHTML”. This properly is not officially supported by PHP’s dom object for some reason, but can be faked using this answer: How to get innerHTML of DOMNode?