Using php to get parent element of link with URL - php

Question

I'm trying to implement a "find and replace" system for broken links. The problem is, for some links there are no replacements. So, I need to comment out certain li elements. You can see my code below to do this. (I'm starting with an HTML form).
<?php
$brokenlink = $_POST['brokenlink'];
$newlink = $_POST['newlink'];
$brokenlink = '"' . $brokenlink . '"';
$newlink = '"' . $newlink . '"';
$di = new RecursiveDirectoryIterator('hugedirectory');
foreach (new RecursiveIteratorIterator($di) as $filename => $file) {
// echo $filename . ' - ' . $file->getSize() . ' bytes <br/>';
$filetoedit = file_get_contents($file);
if(strpos($filetoedit, $brokenlink)) {
echo $brokenlink . "found in " . $filename . "<br/>";
$filetoedit = str_replace($brokenlink, $newlink, $filetoedit);
file_put_contents($filename, $filetoedit);
}
}
?>
What I want to accomplish is this: If I have a URL, I want to be able to find its li parent. For instance, I want PHP to be able to comment out the code below if the user inputs http://www.espn.com in an HTML form, I want php to find this element on my server:
<li>Sports</li>
And replace it with this:
<!-- <li>Sports</li> -->
Is this possible? Thanks.

Answer 1

I would try using this to parse the DOM.
http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/
You can set a class to all the ones you want comment out. Then use this tool to find those classes and comment them all out at once.

Answer 2

Why not use a regexp to find and replace links, it would also take care of the perhaps expensive looping over links.
Here's a regex for matching urls
http://daringfireball.net/2010/07/improved_regex_for_matching_urls
then preg_replace the broken with the new, or the broken with the commented out version of the broken link
Alternatively you can just run grep on the directory via shell_exec, that way you don't have to open / read and parse files yourself.
Also take a look at this match url pattern in php using regular expression

Answer 3

I suggest you construct DOMDocument with the file content and use XPath to search for the broken link node.
$dom = new DOMDocument();
#$dom->loadHTML($filetoedit);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$nodes = $xpath->query('//li/a[#href="' . $brokenlink . '"]');
for ($i = 0; $i < $nodes->length; $i++) {
$node = $nodes->item($i);
// Do whatever you want here
}