Php html parsing, I want to save parsed elements into an array - php

Question

I'm trying to parse the html page and accessing some of the tags. I am parsing all of those tags and displaying the result in form of indentation which is according to the level of tags e.g. header tags h1, h2, h3 etc. Now, I want to save the resultant data (indented table of contents) into an array along with the name of the tags. Kindly help me to sort out my problem.
Here is my php code... I'm using html dom parser.
include ("simple_html_dom.php");
session_start();
error_reporting(0);
$string = file_get_contents('test.php');
$tags = array(0 => '<h1', 1 => '<h2', 2 => '<h3', 3 => '<h4', 4 => '<h5', 5 => '<h6');
function parser($html, $needles = array()){
$positions = array();
foreach ($needles as $needle){
$lastPos = 0;
while (($lastPos = strpos($html, $needle, $lastPos))!== false)
{
$positions[] = $lastPos;
$lastPos = $lastPos + strlen($needle);
}
unset($needles[0]);
if(count($positions) > 0){
break;
}
}
if(count($positions) > 0){
for ($i = 0; $i < count($positions); $i++) {
?>
<div class="<?php echo $i; ?>" style="padding-left: 20px; font-size: 14px;">
<?php
if($i < count($positions)-1){
$temp = explode('</', substr($html, $positions[$i]+4));
$pos = strpos($temp[0], '>');
echo substr($temp[0], $pos);
parser(substr($html, $positions[$i]+4, $positions[$i+1]-$positions[$i]-4), $needles);
} else {
$temp = explode('</', substr($html, $positions[$i]+4));
$pos = strpos($temp[0], '>');
echo substr($temp[0], $pos+1);
parser(substr($html, $positions[$i]+4), $needles);
}
?>
</div>
<?php
}
} else {
// not found any position of a tag
}
}
parser($string, $tags);

Answer 1

If you wanted to do it using SimpleXML and XPath, there is a shorter and much more readable version you could try...
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string);
$tags = $xml->xpath("//h1 | //h2 | //h3 | //h4");
$data = [];
foreach ( $tags as $tag ) {
$elementData['name'] = $tag->getName();
$elementData['content'] = (string)$tag;
$data[] = $elementData;
}
print_r($data);
You can see the pattern in the XPath - it combines any of the elements you need. The use of // means to find at any level and then the name of the element you want to find. These are combined using |, which is the 'or' operator. This could easily be expanded using the same type of expression to build a full set of tags you need.
The program then loops over the elements found and builds an array of each element at a time. Taking the name and content and adding them to the $data array.
Update:
If your file isn't well formed XML, you may have to use DOMDocument and loadHTML. Only a slight difference but is more tollerant of errors...
$string = file_get_contents("links.html");
$xml = new DOMDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors();
$xml->loadHTML($string);
$xp = new DOMXPath($xml);
$tags = $xp->query("//h1 | //h2 | //h3 | //h4");
$data = [];
foreach ( $tags as $tag ) {
$elementData['name'] = $tag->tagName;
$elementData['content'] = $tag->nodeValue;
$data[] = $elementData;
}
print_r($data);