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I am trying to learn how to use xpaths in web scraping. One of the things I'm tryingto do is get all the data from a table element and echo it to the screen. I created a text html document:

   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
 <html>
 <head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
  <title>Insert title here</title>
</head>
<body>
  <table>
    <tbody>
      <tr>
       <td>
       This is table Data 1
        <a href="this/is/href1">
          <img src="/this/is/src1_.jpg">
        </a> 
      </td> 
      <tr>
       <td>
       This is table Data 2
        <a href="this/is/href2">
          <img src="/this/is/src2_.jpg">
        </a> 
      </td> 
      <tr>
       <td>
       This is table Data 3
        <a href="this/is/href3">
          <img src="/this/is/src3_.jpg">
        </a> 
      </td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
</body>
</html>

I am having problems with my xpath query and then iterating through the returned data. I want to display the elemts and the elements attributes as if it were html. The xpaths that I have tried for getting the table data are:

$node = $xpath->query("/html/body/table");
$node = $xpath->query("/html/body/table/child::node()");

To try to iterate through the nodeList I'm using a for loop as suggested on http://php.net/manual/en/domxpath.query.php

for ($i = 0; $i < $node->length; $i++) {

echo "Node Item: " . $node->item($i)->nodeValue  . "<br>";
}

The output:

Node Item: This is table Data 1 This is table Data 2 This is table Data 3

How do I go about getting the anchor and image tags along with the href and src?

user3600424
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1 Answers1

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To get all the img tags:

$xpath->query("//img");

Image tags srcs:

$xpath->query("//img/@src");

Anchor tags hrefs:

$xpath->query("//a/@href");

Also, your HTML is invalid which also may cause some problems using xpath. Make sure to use DOMDocument and DOMXpath

e.g. How can I scrape a website with invalid HTML

Community
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Joe Bashe
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