Adding a class to all English text in HTML? - php

Question

The requirement is to add an englishText class around all english words on a page. The problem is similar to this, but the Javascript solutions wont work for me. I require a PHP example to solve this problem. For example, if you have this:
<p>Hello, 你好</p>
<div>It is me, 你好</div>
<strong>你好, how are you</strong>
Afterwards I need to end with:
<p><span class="englishText">Hello</span>, 你好</p>
<div><span class="englishText">It is me</span>, 你好</div>
<strong>你好, <span class="englishText">how are you</span></strong>
There are more complicated cases, such as:
<strong>你好, TEXT?</strong>
<div>It is me, 你好</div>
This should become:
<strong>你好, <span class="englishText">TEXT?</span></strong>
<div><span class="englishText">It is me</span>, 你好</div>
But I think I can sort out these edge cases once I know how actually iterate over the document correctly.
I can't use javascript to solve this because:
This needs to work on browsers that don't support javascript
I would prefer to have the classes in place on page load so there isn't any delay in rendering the text in the correct font.
I figured the best way to iterate over the document would be using PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser.
But the problem is that if I try this:
foreach ($html->find('div') as $element)
{
// make changes here
}
My concern is that the following case will cause chaos:
<div>
Hello , 你好
<div>Hello, 你好</div>
</div>
As you can see, it's going to go into the first div and then if I process that node, I will be processing the node within that too.
Any ideas how to get around this and only select the nodes for processing once?
UPDATE
I realise now that what I effectively need is a recursive way to iterate over HTML elements with the ability to change them as I iterate over them.

Answer 1

You should travel through siblings that way you won't get in trouble with such a cases...
Something like that:
<?php
foreach ($html->find('div') as $element)
{
foreach($element->next_sibling() as $sibling){
echo $sibling->plaintext()."\n";
}
}
?>
Or much easier way imo:
Just...
Change every <*> to "\n"."<*>" with preg_replace();
Make an array of lines like $lines = explode("\n",$html_string);
3.
foreach($lines as $line){
$text = strip_tags($line);
echo $text;
}