firstChild in DOMDocument not working - php

Question

Here is the code snippet from which I have to fetch the firstChild from the DIV named u-Row-6...
<div class="u-Row-6">
<div class='article_details_price2'>
<strong >
855,90 € *
</strong>
<div class="PseudoPrice">
<em>EVP: 999,00 € *</em>
<span>
(14.32 % <span class="frontend_detail_data">gespart</span>)
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
For this I have used the following code:
foreach($dom->getElementsByTagName('div') as $p) {
if ($p->getAttribute('class') == 'u-Row-6') {
if ($first) {
$name = $p->firstChild-nodeValue;
$name = str_replace('€', '', $name);
$name = str_replace(chr(194), " ", $name);
$first = false;
}
}
}
But mysteriously this code is not working for me

Answer 1

There is a number of problems with your code:
$first is not initialized to a true value, which will prevent the string replacement code from running even once
The $p->firstChild-nodeValue lacks an > before nodeValue
$p->firstChild will actually resolve to a text node (any text between <div class="u-Row-6"> and <div class='article_details_price2'> - currently nothing), not the strong you are looking for and not <div class='article_details_price2'> either, as one might have expected.
You may want to use an XPath query instead, to get all the strong tags within a div of class "u-Row-6", and then loop through the found tags:
$src = <<<EOS
<div class="u-Row-6">
<div class='article_details_price2'>
<strong >
855,90 € *
</strong>
<div class="PseudoPrice">
<em>EVP: 999,00 € *</em>
<span>
(14.32 % <span class="frontend_detail_data">gespart</span>)
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
EOS;
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($src);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$strongTags = $xpath->query('//div[#class="u-Row-6"]//strong');
foreach ($strongTags as $tag) {
echo "The strong tag contents: " . $tag->nodeValue, PHP_EOL;
// Replacement code goes here ...
}
Output:
The strong tag contents:
855,90 € *
XPaths are actually quite handy. Read more about them here.