Using PHP DOM document, to select HTML element by its class and get its text

Question

I trying to get text from div where class = 'review-text', by using PHP's DOM element with following HTML (same structure) and following code.

However this doesn't seem to work

HTML

$html = '
    <div class="page-wrapper">
        <section class="page single-review" itemtype="http://schema.org/Review" itemscope="" itemprop="review">
            <article class="review clearfix">
                <div class="review-content">
                    <div class="review-text" itemprop="reviewBody">
                    Outstanding ... 
                    </div>
                </div>
            </article>
        </section>
    </div>
';

PHP Code

    $classname = 'review-text';
    $dom = new DOMDocument;
    $dom->loadHTML($html);
    $xpath     = new DOMXPath($dom);
    $results = $xpath->query("//*[@class and contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), ' $classname ')]");

    if ($results->length > 0) {
        echo $review = $results->item(0)->nodeValue;
    }

The XPATH syntax to select element by Class is provided at this Blog

I have tried many example from StackOverflow, online tutorials, but none seems to work. Am I missing something ?

`//div[contains(@class, 'review-text')]` – Royal Bg Aug 12 '13 at 08:53 — Royal Bg, Aug 12 '13 at 08:53

Frank Houweling · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-12T09:05:20.793

The following XPath query does what you want. Just replace the argument provided to $xpath->query with the following:

//div[@class="review-text"]

Edit: For easy development, you can test your own XPath query's online at http://www.xpathtester.com/test.

Edit2: Tested this code; it worked perfectly.

<?php

$html = '
    <div class="page-wrapper">
        <section class="page single-review" itemtype="http://schema.org/Review" itemscope="" itemprop="review">
            <article class="review clearfix">
                <div class="review-content">
                    <div class="review-text" itemprop="reviewBody">
                    Outstanding ... 
                    </div>
                </div>
            </article>
        </section>
    </div>
';

$classname = 'review-text';
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$results = $xpath->query("//*[@class='" . $classname . "']");

if ($results->length > 0) {
    echo $review = $results->item(0)->nodeValue;
}

?>

I did try your XPath query, that doesn't seem to work either. Does the problem lie with code syntax before querying the XPath. — Abhishek Madhani, Aug 12 '13 at 08:58

score 7 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

Expanding on Frak Houweling answer, it is also possible to use DomXpath to search within a specific DomNode. This can be acheived by passing the contextNode as a second argument to DomXpath->query method:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML ($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath ($dom);

foreach ($xpath->query ("//section[@class='page single-review']") as $section)
{
    // search for sub nodes inside each element
    foreach ($xpath->query (".//div[@class='review-text']", $section) as $review)
    {
        echo $review->nodeValue;
    }
}

Note that when searching inside nodes you need to use relative paths by adding a dot . at the beginning of the expression:

"//div[@class='review-text']" // absolute path, search starts from the root element
".//div[@class='review-text']" // relative path, search starts from the provided contextNode

Using PHP DOM document, to select HTML element by its class and get its text

2 Answers2

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