extracting and printing an html element by it's id using DOMDocument - php

Question

i want to extract couple of tables from a web page and show them in my page
i was going to use regex to extract them but then i saw the DOMDocument class
and it seems cleaner i've looked in stackoverflow and it seems all the questions are about getting inner text or using a loop to get inner nodes of elements . i want to now how can i extract and print a html element by it's id .
$html = file_get_contents("www.site.com");
$xml = new DOMDocument();
$xml->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($xml);
$table =$xpath->query("//*[#id='myid']");
$table->saveHTML(); // this obviously doesn't work
how can i show or echo the $table as an actual html table on my page ?

Answer 1

Firstly, DOMDocument has a getElementById() method so your XPath is unnecessary - although I suspect that is how it works underneath.
Secondly, in order to get fragments of markup rather than a whole document, you use DOMNode::C41N(), so your code would look like this:
<?php
// Load the HTML into a DOMDocument
// Don't forget you could just pass the URL to loadHTML()
$html = file_get_contents("www.site.com");
$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0');
$dom->loadHTML($html);
// Get the target element
$element = $dom->getElementById('myid');
// Get the HTML as a string
$string = $element->C14N();
See a working example.

Answer 2

You can use DOMElement::C14N() to get the canonicalized HTML(XML) representation of a DOMElement, or if you like a bit more control so that you can filter certain elements and attributes you can use something like this:
function toHTML($nodeList, $tagsToStrip=array('script','object','noscript','form','style'),$attributesToSkip=array('on*')) {
$html = '';
foreach($nodeList as $subIndex => $values) {
if(!in_array(strtolower($values->nodeName), $tagsToStrip)) {
if(substr($values->nodeName,0,1) != '#') {
$html .= ' <'.$values->nodeName;
if($values->attributes) {
for($i=0;$values->attributes->item($i);$i++) {
if( !in_array( strtolower($values->attributes->item($i)->nodeName) , $attributesToSkip ) && (in_array('on*',$attributesToSkip) && substr( strtolower($values->attributes->item($i)->nodeName) ,0 , 2) != 'on') ) {
$vvv = $values->attributes->item($i)->nodeValue;
if( in_array( strtolower($values->attributes->item($i)->nodeName) , array('src','href') ) ) {
$vvv = resolve_href( $this->url , $vvv );
}
$html .= ' '.$values->attributes->item($i)->nodeName.'="'.$vvv.'"';
}
}
}
if(in_array(strtolower($values->nodeName), array('br','img'))) {
$html .= ' />';
} else {
$html .= '> ';
if(!$values->firstChild) {
$html .= htmlspecialchars( $values->textContent , ENT_COMPAT , 'UTF-8' , true );
} else {
$html .= toHTML($values->childNodes,$tagsToStrip,$attributesToSkip);
}
$html .= ' </'.$values->nodeName.'> ';
}
} elseif(substr($values->nodeName,1,1) == 't') {
$inner = htmlspecialchars( $values->textContent , ENT_COMPAT , 'UTF-8' , true );
$html .= $inner;
}
}
}
return $html;
}
echo toHTML($table);