PHP - How to include a section of a site?

Question

I want to include a section of one html document (X) in another one (Y).

There's:

<div id="cmform">
....
....
</div>

in html document X and I need to include it in a div in html document Y. I started to read PHP documentation and have found an info about "file_get_contents" function. If I do:

<?php
   $a = file_get_contents("http://site.com/document.html");
   echo ($a);
?>

I get the whole page and I don't know how to... narrow it to that one div...

It's on a local server so any url will do in an example code. — Maria, May 17 '13 at 20:18

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 17 '13 at 20:31

0

You can use the DOMDocument class in PHP.

Documentation:
http://php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php

Example:

$documentText = file_get_contents("http://site.com/document.html");
$domDocument = new DOMDocument();
$domDocument->loadHTML( $documentText );
$myDivNode = $domDocument->getElementById( 'the-id-of-the-div' );
$myDivText = $domDocument->saveHTML( $myDivNode );
echo $myDivText;

answered May 17 '13 at 20:31

John Severinson

5,145
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I get an error: Warning: DOMDocument::saveHTML() expects exactly 0 parameters, 1 given in /public_html/test/form.php on line 53 – Maria May 17 '13 at 20:38
The parameter in that method was added in PHP 5.3.6, I just read. – John Severinson May 17 '13 at 20:41

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:31

You have two ways to do it:

If the remote site has CORS headers (Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *), you can inject it using an AJAX request; Please note that this will fail on browsers that do not support CORS
You can parse it on the server

Option 2 is by far your preferred approach and relies on two libraries (three if you're like me): curl, which will handle the HTTP request, and DOMDocument, which handles the parsing.

I wrote a parser for someone a while back. You can find it there: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16144603/2167834 . It has a lot of detailed explanations on how to go through the DOM using DOMDocument.

Please note that DOMDocument is especially prone to breaking on the following:

Incorrect charset definitions
Broken HTML
Inline JavaScript

You can, however, rewrite your source to deal with this.

In your case, once you have the DOMDocument and DOMXPath object, you want to query("//[@id=\"cmform\"]"). The two forward slashes mean "any parent", [@id is an exact match on the parameter id.

Note that **this will fail if the DOM document has multiple elements with the same ID. They shouldn't have, by HTML spec.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 17 '13 at 20:43

Actually file_get_contents() returns an string representig the content of the file, the simplest way you have is to parse the string to get the value of the div, check this example:

$html = 'hola <div id="cmform">'.
            "the content of div".
            "</div>adios";

echo preg_replace('/(.+)<div id="cmform">(.+)<\/div>(.+)/m', '\2', $html);

score -1 · Answer 4 · answered May 17 '13 at 20:05

-1

You want to use something like .load function in jquery

answered May 17 '13 at 20:05

underscore

6,495
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`$('#cmform').load('document.html #div_id');` – user20232359723568423357842364 May 17 '13 at 20:07
There's a complicated, dynamic form that I want to include and I already have had a lot of troubles using jquery to handle it. – Maria May 17 '13 at 20:09
@Maria u mean dynamically created form or dynamically what? – underscore May 17 '13 at 20:11
It's a form generated by Gravity Form WP plugin with a lot of fields and complex logic conditions. – Maria May 17 '13 at 20:14
Do you know form url(dynamic form generate path) ? – underscore May 17 '13 at 20:17
It's a local server running WP. – Maria May 17 '13 at 20:20
if you can create a widget for that form u can load it for another place – underscore May 17 '13 at 20:23
The other site is not a part of Wordpress. – Maria May 17 '13 at 20:27
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8973672/jquery-load-content-from-a-remote-site – underscore May 17 '13 at 20:30
load the requested url in an iframe rather than a div by setting the src parameter using JS. Simple, easy but would limit your access to the data in the iframe. – underscore May 17 '13 at 20:31
No it is not that simple. The form shows extra fields depending on multiple chooses so the iframe height changes. It doesn't look good. – Maria May 17 '13 at 20:34
Do u think u can't use iframe because of what extractly ? – underscore May 17 '13 at 20:36

PHP - How to include a section of a site?

4 Answers4