How to get all text nodes value between span nodes - php

Question

I have following html structure
<span class="x">a</span>
<br>
• first
<br>
• Second
<br>
• second
<br>
• third
<br>
<br>
<span class="x">b</span>
I need to get all the text value(comma separated) that occur between span nodes i.e first,second,second,third
How can this be done using xpath,dom

Answer 1

You can query these elements using XPath, but need to do the "cleanup" of these bullet points in PHP as SimpleXML only supports XPath 1.0 without extended string editing capabilities.
Most important is the XPath expression, which I will explain in detail:
//span[text()='a']/following::text(): Fetch all text nodes after the span with content "a"
[. = //span[text()='b']/preceding::text()] Compare each of them to the set of text nodes before the span with content "b"
And here's the full code, you might want to invest some more effort in removing the bullet point. Make sure PHP is evaluating it as UTF-8, otherwise you will get Mojibake instead of the bullet point.
<?php
$html = '
<span class="x">a</span>
<br>
• first
<br>
• Second
<br>
• second
<br>
• third
<br>
<br>
<span class="x">b</span></wrap>
';
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$dom->strictErrorChecking = false;
$dom->recover = true;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$results = $xpath->query("//span[text()='a']/following::text()[. = //span[text()='b']/preceding::text()]");
foreach ($results as $result) {
$token = trim(str_replace('•', '', $result->nodeValue));
if ($token) $tokens[] = $token;
}
echo implode(',', $tokens);
?>

Answer 2

Your html structure of <br> followed by bullet points can be easily converted into an unordered list <ul></ul> without changing the layout of your page.
Then you can select the text of all of the list items <li></li> and comma delimit them. I've included an example in this jsFiddle.
To get this text you can use this:
var nodes = $('ul > li').map(function() {
return $(this).text();
}).toArray().join(",");
where nodes is the string 'first,Second,second,third'.