simplexml doesnt load tag classes?

Question

I have a bit of php that grabs the html from a page and loads it into a simplexml object. However its not getting the classes of the element within a

The php

//load the html page with curl
$html = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($html);
$sxml = simplexml_import_dom($doc);

The page html. Which if I do a var_dump of $html shows its been scraped and exists in $html

    <li class="large">
        <a style="" id="ref_3" class="off" href="#" onmouseover="highlightme('07');return false;" onclick="req('379');return false;" title="">07</a>
    </li>

The var_dump (below) of $doc and $sxml show that the a class of 'off' is now missing. Unfortunately I need to process the page based on this class.

            [8]=>
             object(SimpleXMLElement)#50 (2) {
              ["@attributes"]=>
              array(1) {
                ["class"]=>
                string(16) "large"
              }
              ["a"]=>
              string(2) "08"
            }

do you want to get all `a` elements that have the class `off` from your document? or all `a` elements that have a `li` with class `large? — Alex Andrei, Oct 21 '15 at 14:32
I need to find all the a elements within an li with a class of large. In my other question we have extracted all the people and their hours, I need to extract the string of those which are 'off'. Problem is as you can see in the above example simplxml is not pulling out the class of just the string :-( Full html here with off classes http://bl.ocks.org/hotnuts21/2a3658c34f61872b6709 — Paul M, Oct 21 '15 at 15:19

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 21 '15 at 15:51

Using simplexml_load_file and xpath, see the inline comments.

What you are after, really, once you found the element you need is this

$row->a->attributes()->class=="off"

And the full code below:

// let's take all the divs that have the class "stff_grid"
$divs = $xml->xpath("//*[@class='stff_grid']");

// for each of these elements, let's print out the value inside the first p tag
foreach($divs as $div){
    print $div->p->a . PHP_EOL;

    // now for each li tag let's print out the contents inside the a tag
    foreach ($div->ul->li as $row){

        // same as before
        print "  - " . $row->a;
        if ($row->a->attributes()->class=="off") print " *off*";
        print PHP_EOL;

        // or shorter
        // print "  - " . $row->a . (($row->a->attributes()->class=="off")?" *off*":"") . PHP_EOL;

    }
}
/* this outputs the following
Person 1
  - 1 hr *off*
  - 2 hr
  - 3 hr *off*
  - 4 hr
  - 5 hr
  - 6 hr *off*
  - 7 hr *off*
  - 8 hr
Person 2
  - 1 hr
  - 2 hr
  - 3 hr
  - 4 hr
  - 5 hr
  - 6 hr
  - 7 hr *off*
  - 8 hr *off*
Person 3
  - 1 hr
  - 2 hr
  - 3 hr
  - 4 hr *off*
  - 5 hr
  - 6 hr
  - 7 hr *off*
  - 8 hr
*/

ok this works and doing a var_dump shows that the attributes are indeed there in the object, whereas they are not in my original post which is odd. I will need to work backwards to understand why my original object wasnt loading these attributes. Thanks for all your help, i have created and will award you a bounty for all your help. — Paul M, Oct 22 '15 at 18:53
You are welcome @PaulM ! but the bounty is not really necessary. — Alex Andrei, Oct 22 '15 at 19:00
For anyone else that gets this far, It appears just switching from simplexml_load_dom to simplexml_load_file made sure all the attributes on all elements were in the object so I could then access them. — Paul M, Oct 23 '15 at 08:45

simplexml doesnt load tag classes?

1 Answers1