wildhoney/xpath-document

Friendlier XPath extension of DOMDocument for those fluent in beloved XPath!

XPathDocument

, _(*1)

Bower: bower install wildhoney/xpath-document, _(*2)

Getting Started

XPathDocument allows you to chain your query methods, allowing you to delve deeper into the DOM hierarchy with each iteration., _(*3)

$posts = $xpathDocument->query('//div[@class="posts"]');

foreach ($posts as $post) {
    $comments = $post->query('div[@class="comments"]');
}

Each query will return an instance of XPathDocument_Dom_List – and this class implements Iterator, ArrayAccess and Countable, which gives you lots of useful methods for manipulating the node collection., _(*4)

, _(*5)

Typically XPathDocument_Dom_List will hold a collection of XPathDocument_Dom_Element instances – but other instances are possible:, _(*6)

• XPathDocument_Dom_Element – generic elements with values and attributes;
• XPathDocument_Dom_Attr – specific for node attributes;
• XPathDocument_Dom_Text – specific for text values of nodes;

The latter two have a simple getText method for returning their values. However, XPathDocument_Dom_Element has the greatest flexibility., _(*7)

Element Instance

With an instance of XPathDocument_Dom_Element you have the following methods:, _(*8)

• getText – retrieve the value of the node;
• getHtml – retrieve the HTML value of the node;
• getName – retrieve the name of the node (span, div, etc...);
• getAttribute – retrieve an attribute by its name;
• query – use node as the context for further querying;

Reddit Example

Please see the Reddit.com example in the example/index.php which will demonstrate how simple it is to crawl websites with XPathDocument!, _(*9)