How do you access Simple DOM selectors?

Question

I can access some of the 'class' items with a

$ret = $html->find('articleINfo'); and then print the first key of the returned array.

However, there are other tags I need like span=id"firstArticle_0" and I cannot seem to find it.

$ret = $html->find('#span=id[ etc ]');

In some cases something is returned, but it's not an array, or is an array with empty keys.

Unfortunately I cannot use var_dump to see the object, since var_dump produces 1000 pages of unreadable junk. The code looks like this.

<div id="articlething"> 
    <p class="byline">By Lord Byron and <a href="www.marriedtothesea.com">Alister Crowley</a></p> 
    <p> 
    <span class="location">GEORGIA MOUNTAINS, Canada</span> | 
    <span class="timestamp">Fri Apr 29, 2011 11:27am EDT</span> 
    </p> 
</div> 
<span id="midPart_0"></span><span class="mainParagraph"><p><span        class="midLocation">TUSCALOOSA, Alabama</span> - Who invented cheese? Everyone wants to know. They held a big meeting. Tom Cruise is a scientologist. </p> 

</span><span id="midPart_1"></span><p>The president and his family visited Chuck-e-cheese in the morning </p><span id="midPart_2"></span><p>In Russia, 900 people were lost in the balls.</p><span id="midPart_3">

Suggested third party alternatives to [SimpleHtmlDom](http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/) that actually use [DOM](http://php.net/manual/en/book.dom.php) instead of String Parsing: [phpQuery](http://code.google.com/p/phpquery/), [Zend_Dom](http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.dom.html), [QueryPath](http://querypath.org/) and [FluentDom](http://www.fluentdom.org). — Gordon, Apr 29 '11 at 15:52
Example I can obtain "United States" from `file_get_html($url)->find('div[id=location]');` but when i try the same on `file_get_html($url)->find('span[id=midArticle_0]');` I get empty nothing. Ugh. Between this and the well known memory issues. Perhaps I'll have to switch. I will admit I am ignorant about how objects work, i'm a lexicographer. — user723220, Apr 29 '11 at 16:52
Yea, Simple_DOM is not the way to go. I've wasted 2 days trying to get it to work. Even when it does work, you'll be lucky if you can finish without memory failure. I figured out my original question is idiotic, because there is nothing between the SPAN tags. The text is between the

tags, which Simple_DOM freezes when I try to var_dump anyway. It's a shame I liked the format. — user723220, Apr 29 '11 at 18:43

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 23 '11 at 05:36

0

Try using this. Worked for me very well and extremely easy to use. http://code.google.com/p/phpquery/

answered May 23 '11 at 05:36

Uptown

1
1

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 02 '11 at 00:56

Simple HTML DOM can be used easily to find a span with a specific class.

If want all span's with class=location then:

// create HTML DOM
$html = file_get_html($iUrl);

// get text elements
$aObj = $html->find('span[class=location]');

Then do something like:

foreach($aObj as $key=>$oValue)
{
   echo $key.": ".$oValue->plaintext."<br />";
}

It worked for me using your example my output was:

label=span, class=location: Found 1

0: GEORGIA MOUNTAINS, Canada

Hope that helps... and please Simple HTML DOM is great for what it does and easy to use once you get the hang of it. Keep trying and you will have a number of examples that you just use over and over again. I've scraped some pretty crazy pages and they get easier and easier.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 27 '12 at 19:56

The docs on the PHP Simple DOM parser are spotty on deciphering Open Graph meta tags. Here's what seems to work for me:

<?php
// grab the contents of the page
$summary = file_get_html($url);

// Get image possibilities (for example)

$img = array();

// First, if the webpage has an og:image meta tag, it's easy:
if ($summary->find('meta[property=og:image]')) {
  foreach ($summary->find('meta[property=og:image]') as $e) {
    $img[] = $e->attr['content'];
  }
}
?>

How do you access Simple DOM selectors?

3 Answers3