Using Zend_Dom as a screen scraper - php

Question

How?
More to the point...
this:
$url = 'http://php.net/manual/en/class.domelement.php';
$client = new Zend_Http_Client($url);
$response = $client->request();
$html = $response->getBody();
$dom = new Zend_Dom_Query($html);
$result = $dom->query('div.note');
Zend_Debug::dump($result);
gives me this:
object(Zend_Dom_Query_Result)#867 (7) {
["_count":protected] => NULL
["_cssQuery":protected] => string(8) "div.note"
["_document":protected] => object(DOMDocument)#79 (0) {
}
["_nodeList":protected] => object(DOMNodeList)#864 (0) {
}
["_position":protected] => int(0)
["_xpath":protected] => NULL
["_xpathQuery":protected] => string(33) "//div[contains(#class, ' note ')]"
}
And I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do anything with this.
I want to extract the various parts of the retrieved data (that being the div with the class "note" and any of the elements inside it... like the text and urls) but cannot get anything working.
Someone pointed me to the DOMElement class over at php.net but when I try using some of the methods mentioned, I can't get things to work. How would I grab a chunk of html from a page and go through it grabbing the various parts? How do I inspect this object I am getting back so I can at least figure out what is in it?
Hjälp?

Answer 1

The Iterator implementation of Zend_Dom_Query_Result returns a DOMElement object for each iteration:
foreach ($result as $element) {
var_dump($element instanceof DOMElement); // always true
}
From the $element variable, you can use any DOMElement method:
foreach ($result as $element) {
echo 'Element Id: '.$element->getAttribute('id').PHP_EOL;
if ($element->hasChildNodes()) {
echo 'Element has child nodes'.PHP_EOL;
}
$aNodes = $element->getElementsByTagName('a');
// etc
}
You can also access the document element, or you can use Zend_Dom_Query_Result to do so:
$document1 = $element->ownerDocument;
$document2 = $result->getDocument();
var_dump($document1 === $document2); // true
echo $document1->saveHTML();