code not parsing through a simple google.com test - php

Question

<?php
$file = 'http://www.google.com';
$doc = new DOMDocument();
# $doc->loadHTML(file_get_contents($file));
echo $doc->getElementsByTagName('span')->item(2)->nodeValue;
if (0 != $element->length)
{
$content = trim($element->item(2)->nodeValue);
if (empty($content))
{
$content = trim($element->item(2)->textContent);
}
echo $content . "\n";
}
?>
im trying to get the inner content of a span tag from google.com's home site. this code should output the first span tag, but it is not outputting any results?

Answer 1

The is not an error ... the first span in http://www.google.com is empty and am not sure what else you expect
<span class=gbtcb></span> <---------------- item(0)
<span class=gbtb2></span> <---------------- item(1)
<span class=gbts>Search</span> <----------- item(2)
Try
$element = $doc->getElementsByTagName('span')->item(2);
var_dump($element->nodeValue);
Output
Search

Answer 2

First, bear in mind that the HTML is not necessarily valid XML.
That aside, check that you're actually getting some contents to parse; you need to have allow_url_fopen enabled in order to use file_get_contents() with URLs.
In general, avoid using the error suppression operator (#) because it will almost certainly come back to bite you some time (and this time might well be that time); there is a discussion on this elsewhere on SO.
So, as a first step, switch to something like the following let me know if you're getting any contents at all.
// stop using # to suppress errors
$contents = file_get_contents($file);
// check that you're getting something to parse
echo $contents;

Answer 3

Try this and tell us what the output is
<?
echo ini_get('allow_url_fopen');
?>

Answer 4

Try using cURL to get the data and then load it into a DOMDocument:
<?php
$url = "http://www.google.com";
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$dom = new DOMDocument();
#$dom->loadHTML($data); //The # is necessary to suppress invalid markup
echo $dom->getElementsByTagName('span')->item(2)->nodeValue;
if (0 != $element->length)
{
$content = trim($element->item(2)->nodeValue);
if (empty($content))
{
$content = trim($element->item(2)->textContent);
}
echo $content . "\n";
}
?>