PHP merge tablerows - php

Question

I got a table as DOMDocument which looks like this:
name | user | comment
-----------------------------
Test | user1 | Line 1
Abc | user2 | Line 1
| | Line 2
Test2 | user3 | Line 1
Test3 | user3 | Line 1
| | Line 2
| | Line 3
as you can see, sometimes the comment Wraps over multiple tablerows. (Apparently when the comment is a long one)
When those wraps occur, all fields except for the comment one are empty.
How can I merge those wrapped comments together and output them?
I am currently outputting them like this:
foreach ($xml->getElementsByTagName('table')->item(1)->getElementsByTagName('tr') as $row) {
echo "<tr>";
foreach ($row->getElementsByTagName('td') as $column) {
echo "<td>" . $column->textContent . "</td>";
}
echo "</tr>";
}
}

Answer 1

You are outputting each row before you know what the next one contains. A different approach would be to store each row in an array, allowing you to correct the previous row if the following row meets a certain condition (eg. wrapping). You can then output the resulting array as an HTML table once processed.
Something like this (untested):
// build array
$rows = array();
$xmlRows = $xml->getElementsByTagName('table')->item(1)->getElementsByTagName('tr');
foreach ($xmlRows as $xmlRow) {
$emptyFields = 0;
$row = array();
$xmlColumns = $xmlRow->getElementsByTagName('td');
foreach ($xmlColumns as $xmlColumn) {
if (empty($xmlColumn->textContent)) { // count empty fields
$emptyFields++;
}
$row[] = $xmlColumn->textContent;
}
if ($emptyFields >= 2) { // detect if wrapping has occurred
$lastRow = array_pop($rows); // remove last row from array
$lastRow[2] .= $row[2]; // update last row with wrapped data
$row = $lastRow; // use newly merged row
}
$rows[] = $row;
}
// output array
foreach ($rows as &$row) {
$row = '<td>' . implode('</td><td>', $row) . '</td>';
}
echo '<table><tr>' . implode('</tr><tr>', $rows) . '</tr></table>';