Question

The Scenario

I am using PHP’s SimpleXML to parse a blog feed. The most important node in the tree is the content. I would like to trim the fat from the node, namely the styling features added by the blog site. It is all contained within the same node, and the html entities are encoded. FirePHP logging shows that the string is HTML.

For example, the content node looks like this:

<content type='html'>
BLAH BLAH BLAH.&lt;div class="blogger-post-footer"&gt;&lt;img width='1'
height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker
6552111825067891333-7815715921198109330?l=cobracabanarecords.blogspot.com'
alt='' /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RQPMMDLPMqg/T9ePf9jbXFI/
AAAAAAAAAGs/6egu-05Zim4/s1600/blogHeader.jpg" imageanchor="1"
style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;
"&gt;&lt;img border="0" height="92" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/
-RQPMMDLPMqg/T9ePf9jbXFI/AAAAAAAAAGs/6egu-05Zim4/s320/blogHeader.jpg" 
width="320" /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;a href="http://website.com"&gt;Homepage!&lt;/a&gt;
</content>

My Question

How can I strip out the parts that I want, and leave the bloat? I would like to keep the text, images and links, but don’t need blogger’s styling syntax or the element with class “blogger-post-footer.” Is there a class or function that will identify those particular HTML elements and allow me to strip out the irrelevant elements?

Update

I tried the recommended html_entity_decode function. Now I have the raw html in a string. I read about the DOMDocument class and tried this:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($htmlContent);

Logging with firephp shows the $doc variable contains only the number 1, and I am unable to manipulate the string as though it were HTML. If I can get that to work, I think the next step will be to try a getElementsByTagName function, then traversing through the nodelist to removeChild, or copying it to an array. I could still use some guidance on this.

Answer 1

get the string from <content>, use html_entity_decode() on the string to get back raw html. use strip_tags() to remove all html or create another simple xml object with the content html and go through and remove the style/other attributes and tags.

You can also use strip_tags() to remove all html except for a whitelist of tags that are allowed.