DOMDocument : how to get inner HTML as Strings separated by line-breaks? - php

Question

<blockquote>
<p>
2 1/2 cups sweet cherries, pitted<br>
1 tablespoon cornstarch <br>
1/4 cup fine-grain natural cane sugar
</p>
</blockquote>
hi , i want to get the text inside 'p' tag . you see there are three different line and i want to print them separately after adding some extra text with each line . here is my code block
$tags = $dom->getElementsByTagName('blockquote');
foreach($tags as $tag)
{
$datas = $tag->getElementsByTagName('p');
foreach($datas as $data)
{
$line = $data->nodeValue;
echo $line;
}
}
main problem is $line contains the full text inside 'p' tag including 'br' tag . how can i separate the three lines to treat them respectively ??
thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can do that with XPath. All you have to do is query the text nodes. No need to explode or something like that:
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHtml($html);
$xp = new DOMXPath($dom);
foreach ($xp->query('/html/body/blockquote/p/text()') as $textNode) {
echo "\n<li>", trim($textNode->textContent);
}
The non-XPath alternative would be to iterate the children of the P tag and only output them when they are DOMText nodes:
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHtml($html);
foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('p')->item(0)->childNodes as $pChild) {
if ($pChild->nodeType === XML_TEXT_NODE) {
echo "\n<li>", trim($pChild->textContent);
}
}
Both will output (demo)
<li>2 1/2 cups sweet cherries, pitted
<li>1 tablespoon cornstarch
<li>1/4 cup fine-grain natural cane sugar
Also see DOMDocument in php for an explanation of the node concept. It's crucial to understand when working with DOM.

Answer 2

You can use
$lines = explode('<br>', $data->nodeValue);

Answer 3

here is a solution in javascript syntax
var tempArray = $line.split("<br>");
echo $line[0]
echo $line[1]
echo $line[2]

Answer 4

You can use the php explode function like this. (assuming each line in your <p> tag ends with <br>)
$tags = $dom->getElementsByTagName('blockquote');
foreach($tags as $tag)
{
$datas = $tag->getElementsByTagName('p');
foreach($datas as $data)
{
$contents = $data->nodeValue;
$lines = explode('<br>',$contents);
foreach($lines as $line) {
echo $line;
}
}
}