Get specific element(s) from page - php

Question

I'm trying to pull some data from my website. It is pretty simple, but I can't find any good examples/docs, so I am having a tough time. I'm trying to make an API for my friends to use my blog, but it's a bit difficult. Let's assume I have a website at http://www.sample.com, and the html source for that website is:
<div class="container">
<a href="/mywebsiteblogpost/">
<h2 class="title">im the best</h2>
</a>
<span class="author">Josue Espinosa</span>
<div class="thumb"> <img src="http://www.sample.com/imgsrc" alt="">
<span class="category">sports</span>
</div>
<p>preview text</p>
<a class="more" href="/mywebsiteblogpost/">full text...</a>
</div>
I want to get all of .container's children, the first a child's href value, the text value of the class title, author, the img src for the child inside .thumb, and the text value for category.
I started with the a href src, but I didn't even get that far. I thought $title would be echoing the href value of the first anchor tag inside of container, but it doesn't work.
$text = file_get_contents('http://www.sample.com');
$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0');
$doc->loadHTML($text);
foreach($doc->getElementsByTagName('div') AS $div) {
$class = $div->getAttribute('class');
if(strpos($class, 'container') !== FALSE) {
// title doesnt retrieve the href value of title :(
$title = 'TITLE'.$div->getElementsByTagName('a')->getAttribute('href').'<br>';
//this echos all the text in all of the children of $div
echo $div->textContent.'<br>';
}
}
Can anyone explain why please?

Answer 1

The culprit is $div->getElementsByTagName('a')->getAttribute('href'). The first part, $div->getElementsByTagName('a') retrieves a list of elements, not a single element. So the following ->getAttribute('href') will not do the right thing.
To fix this, iterate just as you do with the div-tags:
foreach($div->getElementsByTagName('a') as $a) {
$href = $a->getAttribute('href');
if ($href) echo "TITLE$href<br>";
}

Answer 2

ok so first
$div->getElementsByTagName('a')
returns a domnodelist (http://php.net/manual/en/class.domnodelist.php) object, You need to get the first item there to get the attribute.
Second
$div->textContent
Does as intended ? show all text content in the $div ?
You may be better off looking at xpath queries( http://php.net/manual/en/class.domxpath.php) for this type of DOM searching

Answer 3

I made some corrections on the php code you posted that doesn't work, may be it can help you keep going
$text = file_get_contents('http://www.sample.com');
$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0');
$doc->loadHTML($text);
foreach($doc->getElementsByTagName('div') AS $div)
{
$class = $div->getAttribute('class');
// _($class);
if(strpos($class, 'container') !== FALSE)
{
// title doesnt retrieve the href value of title :(
$a = $div->getElementsByTagName('a');
foreach ($a as $key => $value)
{
$A = $value;
break;
}
$title = 'TITLE'. $A->getAttribute('href').'<br>';
//this echos all the text in all of the children of $div
echo $div->textContent.'<br>';
}
}