Find and separate the HTML blocks to an array - php

Question

First of all I want to describe the idea - anyone know that any CMS or a simple website has some kind of blocks like the list of articles for example on the main page of wordpress where shown each in a block of information: Title, author, content, date etc.
So the main idea is how to find and separate such blocks of HTML and append each of them to an array.
I thought first need to clear them from: classes, ids and styles.
step1:
<div id="box1">
<h3 class="title_style">Title1</h3>
<p>content for box1</p>
<div class="author">Author Name1<span class="style_date">date1<span>any text</div>
</div>
<div id="box2">
<h3 class="title_style">Title2</h3>
<p>content for box2</p>
<div class="author">Author Name2<span class="style_date">date2<span>any text2</div>
</div>
to
<div>
<h3>Title1</h3>
<p>content for box1</p>
<div>Author Name1<span>date1<span>any text</div>
</div>
<div>
<h3>Title2</h3>
<p>content for box2</p>
<div>Author Name2<span>date2<span>any text2</div>
</div>
Step2:
I need to find each block and write them to an array so I can to put each block to a row in the table like this: (note that this blocks are present on almost any site so it doesn't matter what tags it has, they just repeat with different content and attributes, only the structure is the same)
<table>
<tr id="block1">
<td>Title1</td>
<td>content for box1</td>
<td>Author Name1</td>
<td>date1</td>
<td>any text</td>
</tr>
<tr id="block2">
<td>Title2</td>
<td>content for box2</td>
<td>Author Name2</td>
<td>date2</td>
<td>any text</td>
</tr>
</table>
Any ideas ? I need the logic how to do this, not the code itself.

Answer 1

You can walk the DOM of the document using PHP's DOMDocument class.
So you can do something like this:
$str = <<<STR
<div id="box1">
<h3 class="title_style">Title1</h3>
<p>content for box1</p>
<div class="author">Author Name1<span class="style_date">date1</span>any text</div>
</div>
<div id="box2">
<h3 class="title_style">Title2</h3>
<p>content for box2</p>
<div class="author">Author Name2<span class="style_date">date2</span>any text2</div>
</div>
STR;
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($str);
$divs = $dom->getElementsByTagName('div');
foreach ($divs as $div) {
//read child elements
}

Answer 2

Try this library Simple HTML Dom Parser.