Can't get the plaintext without using foreach - php

Question

I'm trying to use simple_html_dom to get the plaintext ('THIS TEXT') of one HTML element:
<div class="parent">
<span><i class="fa fa-awesome"></i>THIS TEXT</span>
</div>
I'm getting that text by using:
foreach($html->find('div.parent span.child') as $text){
echo $text->plaintext;
}
But it is just one element and I'm searching for a way to get that plaintext without using foreach loop (since it is just one element).
P.S: I've been trying this:
$html->find('div.parent span.child', 1);
But var_dump-ing that results in a NULL.
I also tried this:
$html->find('div.delivery-status span.status', 1)->plaintext;
But var_dump-ing it results in:
Notice: Trying to get property 'plaintext' of non-object in
C:\xampp\htdocs\curl\index.php on line 19
I also read the documentation but i can't seem to be able to figure this one out :(. Can somebody please help me or at least point me into the right direction? :-s
Thank you!:D

Answer 1

You're using a pretty ancient library, but it looks like a foreach loop is how the author intended it to work. This is typical for DOM functions that return a node list for most functions. What's wrong with the loop? You could do this in plain old PHP as well:
$html = <<< HTML
<div class="parent">
<span><i class="fa fa-awesome"></i>THIS TEXT</span>
</div>
HTML;
$dom = new \DomDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new \DOMXPath($dom);
$data = $xpath->query("//div[#class='parent']/span/text()");
echo $data[0]->textContent;

Answer 2

The <span> in the question does not have a child css class, so your selector is not correct. Also you seem to be missing the point that when calling find, the index of children is zero based. Try this:
$str = '<div class="parent"><span><i class="fa fa-awesome"></i>THIS TEXT</span></div>';
$html = str_get_html($str);
// no .child for the span, and 0 as the index of target child
print $html->find('div.parent span', 0)->plaintext;