get value of <h2> of html page with PHP DOM? - php

Question

I have a var of a HTTP (craigslist) link $link, and put the contents into $linkhtml. In this var is the HTML code for a craigslist page, $link.
I need to extract the text between <h2> and </h2>. I could use a regexp, but how do I do this with PHP DOM? I have this so far:
$linkhtml= file_get_contents($link);
$dom = new DOMDocument;
#$dom->loadHTML($linkhtml);
What do I do next to put the contents of the element <h2> into a var $title?

Answer 1

if DOMDocument looks complicated to understand/use to you, then you may try PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser which provides the easiest ever way to parse html.
require 'simple_html_dom.php';
$html = '<h1>Header 1</h1><h2>Header 2</h2>';
$dom = new simple_html_dom();
$dom->load( $html );
$title = $dom->find('h2',0)->plaintext;
echo $title; // outputs: Header 2

Answer 2

You can use this code:
$linkhtml= file_get_contents($link);
$doc = new DOMDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$doc->loadHTML($linkhtml); // loads your html
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$h2text = $xpath->evaluate("string(//h2/text())");
// $h2text is your text between <h2> and </h2>

Answer 3

You can do this with XPath: untested, may contain errors
$linkhtml= file_get_contents($link);
$dom = new DOMDocument;
#$dom->loadHTML($linkhtml);
$xpath = new DOMXpath($dom);
$elements = $xpath->query("/html/body/h2");
if (!is_null($elements)) {
foreach ($elements as $element) {
$nodes = $element->childNodes;
foreach ($nodes as $node) {
echo $node->nodeValue. "\n";
}
}
}