Find immediate descendants with PHP Simple DOM parser - php

Question

I would like to be able to do the equivalent of
$html->find("#foo>ul")
But the PHP Simple DOM library doesn't recognize the "immediate descendant" selector > and so finds all <ul> items under #foo including those that are nested deeper in the dom.
What would you recommend as the best way to grab the immediate descendants that are of a specific type?

Answer 1

You can use DomElementFilter to fetch the desired type of nodes under some Dom branch. This is described here:
PHP DOM: How to get child elements by tag name in an elegant manner?
Or do a regular loop on all childNodes and filter then by their tag name by yourself:
foreach ($parent->childNodes as $node)
if ($node->nodeName == "tagname1")
...

Answer 2

HTML snippet
<div id="foo">
<ul>
<li>1</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>2</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>3</li>
</ul>
</div>
PHP code to get FIRST <ul>
echo $html->find('#foo>ul', 0);
this will output
<ul>
<li>1</li>
</ul>
but if you want to get just 1 from first <ul>
echo $html->find('#foo>ul', 0)->plaintext;

Answer 3

Just to share the solutions i found in related posts and to put it in a nutshell:
"Find immediate descendants with PHP Simple DOM parser" works both with...
...PHP Simple DOM:
//if there is only one div containing your searched tag
foreach ($html->find('div.with-given-class')[0]->children() as $div_with_given_class) {
if ($div_with_given_class->tag == 'tag-you-are-searching-for') {
$output [] = $div_with_given_class->plaintext; //or whatever you want
}
}
//if there are more divs with a given class (better solution)
$all_divs_with_given_class =
$html->find('div.with-given-class');
foreach ($all_divs_with_given_class as $single_div_with_given_class) {
foreach ($single_div_with_given_class->children() as $children) {
if ($children->tag == 'tag-you-are-searching-for') {
$output [] = $children->plaintext; //or whatever you want
}
}
}
...and also PHP DOM/xpath:
$all_divs_with_given_class =
$xpath->query("//div[#class='with-given-class']/tag-you-are-searching-for");
if (!is_null($all_divs_with_given_class)) {
foreach ($all_divs_with_given_class as $tag-you-are-searching-for) {
$ouput [] = $tag-you-are-searching-for->nodeValue; //or whatever you want
}
}
Note that you have to use single slashes "/" in the xpath to find immediate descendants only.