Parsing HTML Table Data from XML with PHP - php

Question

I am somewhat new with PHP, but can't really wrap my head around what I am doing wrong here given my situation.
Problem: I am trying to get the href of a certain HTML element within a string of characters inside an XML object/element via Reddit (if you visit this page, it would be the actual link of the video - not the reddit link but the external youtube link or whatever - nothing else).
Here is my code so far (code updated):
Update: Loop-mania! Got all of the hrefs, but am now trying to store them inside a global array to access a random one outside of this function.
function getXMLFeed() {
echo "<h2>Reddit Items</h2><hr><br><br>";
//$feedURL = file_get_contents('https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/.xml?limit=200');
$feedURL = 'https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/.xml?limit=200';
$xml = simplexml_load_file($feedURL);
//define each xml entry from reddit as an item
foreach ($xml -> entry as $item ) {
foreach ($item -> content as $content) {
$newContent = (string)$content;
$html = str_get_html($newContent);
foreach($html->find('table') as $table) {
$links = $table->find('span', '0');
//echo $links;
foreach($links->find('a') as $link) {
echo $link->href;
}
}
}
}
}
XML Code:
http://pasted.co/0bcf49e8
I've also included JSON if it can be done this way; I just preferred XML:
http://pasted.co/f02180db
That is pretty much all of the code. Though, here is another piece I tried to use with DOMDocument (scrapped it).
foreach ($item -> content as $content) {
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom -> loadHTML($content);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$classname = "/html/body/table[1]/tbody/tr/td[2]/span[1]/a";
foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('table') as $node) {
echo $dom->saveHtml($node), PHP_EOL;
//$originalURL = $node->getAttribute('href');
}
//$html = $dom->saveHTML();
}
I can parse the table fine, but when it comes to getting certain element's values (nothing has an ID or class), I can only seem to get ALL anchor tags or ALL table rows, etc.
Can anyone point me in the right direction? Let me know if there is anything else I can add here. Thanks!
Added HTML:
I am specifically trying to extract <span>[link]</span> from each table/item.
http://pastebin.com/QXa2i6qz

Answer 1

The following code can extract you all the youtube links from each content.
function extract_youtube_link($xml) {
$entries = $xml['entry'];
$videos = [];
foreach($entries as $entry) {
$content = html_entity_decode($entry['content']);
preg_match_all('/<span><a href="(.*)">\[link\]/', $content, $matches);
if(!empty($matches[1][0])) {
$videos[] = array(
'entry_title' => $entry['title'],
'author' => preg_replace('/\/(.*)\//', '', $entry['author']['name']),
'author_reddit_url' => $entry['author']['uri'],
'video_url' => $matches[1][0]
);
}
}
return $videos;
}
$xml = simplexml_load_file('reddit.xml');
$xml = json_decode(json_encode($xml), true);
$videos = extract_youtube_link($xml);
foreach($videos as $video) {
echo "<p>Entry Title: {$video['entry_title']}</p>";
echo "<p>Author: {$video['author']}</p>";
echo "<p>Author URL: {$video['author_reddit_url']}</p>";
echo "<p>Video URL: {$video['video_url']}</p>";
echo "<br><br>";
}
The code outputs in the multidimensional format of array with the elements inside are entry_title, author, author_reddit_url and video_url. Hope it helps you!

Answer 2

If you're looking for a specific element you don't need to parse the whole thing. One way of doing it could be to use the DOMXPath class and query directly the xml. The documentation should guide you through.
http://php.net/manual/es/class.domxpath.php .