Question

Say I have a WordPress post, and certain words are wrapped in span tags.

For example:

<p>John went to the <span>bakery</span> today,
and after picking up his favourite muffin
he made his way across to the <span>park</span>
and spent a couple hours on the <span>swings</span>
with his friends.</p>

Is then then a way using PHP to dynamically spit them (the words in the span tags) out as an ordered list in my template file?

Like so:

<h3>What John Did Today</h3>
<ol>
<li>bakery</li>
<li>park</li>
<li>swings</li>
</ol>

If someone could point be in the right direction of how to do something like this, it would be much appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

$str = '<p>John went to the <span>bakery</span> today, and after picking up his favourite muffin     he made his way across to the <span>park</span> and spent a couple hours on the <span>swings</span> with his friends.</p>';

$d = new DomDocument;
$d->loadHTML($str);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($d);
echo "<h3>What John Did Today</h3>\n";
echo "<ol>\n";
foreach ($xpath->query('//span') as $span)
  echo "<li>".$span->nodeValue."</li>\n";
echo "</ol>\n";