PHP Simple HTML DOM parser give faulty data - php

Question

I'm using PHP Simple HTML DOM to parse a web page with the following HTML. Notice the extra </span>-tags in each <li>.
<li>
<span class="name">
Link asdasd
</span>
</span>
</li>
<li>
<span class="name">
Link asdasd2
</span>
</span>
</li>
My queries are:
$lis = $dom->find('li');
foreach ($lis as $li) {
$spans = $li->find('span');
foreach ($spans as $span) {
echo $span->plaintext."<br>";
}
}
My output is:
Link asdasd
Link asdasd2
-----------
Link asdasd2
-----------
As you can see the find('span') finds two spans as children to the first <li> and getting the value from the next <span> it can find (even though it's a child of the next <li>). Removing the trailing </span> fixes the problem.
My questions are:
Why is this happening?
How I can solve this particular case?
Everything else works well and I'm not in a position to make big changes to my script. I can change the DOM queries easily though if needed.
I am thinking about counting start and closing tags and stripping one </span> if there are too many of them. Since they will always be <span>s, are there a smart way to check it with regexp?

Answer 1

1) Simple is trying to fix your extra </span> by adding a <span> somewhere. So now you have an extra span that shouldn't be there. For the record, DomDocument would do the same thing, although perhaps in a more predictable way.
2) Simplify:
foreach ($dom->find('li > span') as $span) {
echo $span->plaintext."<br>";
}
// Link asdasd <br> Link asdasd2 <br>
Now you've told it you only want the span that is a child of a li. Even better, do something like:
foreach ($dom->find('span.name') as $span) {
echo $span->plaintext."<br>";
}
Use those attributes, that's what they're good for.

Answer 2

$newTxt = preg_replace('/\<\/span\>[\S]*\<\/span\>/','</span>',$txt);
The method 'find(x)' is an overloaded function that can return the equivalents of:
$e->getElementById(x);
$e->getElementsById(x);
$e->getElementByTagName(x); and
$e->getElementsByTagName(x);
In your first call makes it use of the last call. In the second $li of the third possibility. It is probably a method of optimization which question you were asking according to the API. I guess you have found a bug in the API, because you were asking in both cases the use of the third call:
$e->getElementByTagName();