PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser: Accessing custom attributes - php

Question

I want to access a custom attribute that I added to some elements in an HTML file, here's an example of the littleBox="somevalue" attribute
<div id="someId" littleBox="someValue">inner text</div>
The Following doesn't work:
foreach($html->find('div') as $element){
echo $element;
if(isset($element->type)){
echo $element->littleBox;
}
}
I saw an article with a similar problem, but I couldn't replicate it for some reason. Here is what I tried:
function retrieveValue($str){
if (stripos($str, 'littleBox')){//check if element has it
$var=preg_split("/littleBox=\"/",$str);
//echo $var[1];
$var1=preg_split("/\"/",$var[1]);
echo $var1[0];
}
else
return false;
}
When ever I call the retrieveValue() function, nothing happens. Is $element (in the first PHP example above) not a string? I don't know if I missed something but it's not returning anything.
Here's the script in it's entirety:
<?php
require("../../simplehtmldom/simple_html_dom.php");
if (isset($_POST['submit'])){
$html = file_get_html($_POST['webURL']);
// Find all images
foreach($html->find('div') as $element){
echo $element;
if(isset($element->type)!= false){
echo retrieveValue($element);
}
}
}
function retrieveValue($str){
if (stripos($str, 'littleBox')){//check if element has it
$var=preg_split("/littleBox=\"/",$str);
//echo $var[1];
$var1=preg_split("/\"/",$var[1]);
return $var1[0];
}
else
return false;
}
?>
<form method="post">
Website URL<input type="text" name="webURL">
<br />
<input type="submit" name="submit">
</form>

Answer 1

Have you tried:
$html->getElementById("someId")->getAttribute('littleBox');
You could also use SimpleXML:
$html = '<div id="someId" littleBox="someValue">inner text</div>';
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadXML($html);
$div = simplexml_import_dom($dom);
echo $div->attributes()->littleBox;
I would advice against using regex to parse html but shouldn't this part be like this:
$str = $html->getElementById("someId")->outertext;
$var = preg_split('/littleBox=\"/', $str);
$var1 = preg_split('/\"/',$var[1]);
echo $var1[0];
Also see this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/8851091/1059001

Answer 2

See that http://code.google.com/p/phpquery/ it's like jQuery but on php. Very strong library.