PHP CSS Selector Library? [closed]

Question

Is there a PHP class/library that would allow me to query an XHTML document with CSS selectors? I need to scrape some pages for data that is very easily accessible if I could somehow use CSS selectors (jQuery has spoiled me!). Any ideas?

CubicleSoft · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-12 09:59:16Z

44

After Googling further (initial results weren't very helpful), it seems there is actually a Zend Framework library for this, along with some others:

edited Feb 12, 2017 at 9:59

CubicleSoft

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answered Nov 4, 2008 at 2:19

Wilco

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5 Comments

Sampson Over a year ago

+1 phpQuery is absolutely wonderful.

NessDan Over a year ago

I tried out 3 of the items you listed. In the end, my choice is Simple HTML DOM, purely because they explain it's usage very simply and well put. phpQuery got the job done, but I felt as if there was a lack of documentation and support. Zend successfully grabbed my query and counted it, but when it came to getting the values, it failed. Again, my suggestion is Simple HTML DOM.

Bobby Jack Over a year ago

Although simple html dom is quite popular, a) it doesn't have good coverage of the full selector syntax b) it doesn't appear to be in active development.

qris Over a year ago

I'm working with phpQuery for now: Zend_Dom_Query probably only helps if you're already using Zend Framework. Simple HTML DOM Parser looks too small. phpQuery looks good, also wraps DOMDocument which I'm already using everywhere in my tests, so it doesn't require reparsing for me. DomQuery has disappeared. pqLite is an option, but uses its own node structure, so requires reparsing the document.

CubicleSoft Over a year ago

Fair warning! pqLite appears to be dead. The one search result I found linked out to a malware site.

nickf · Accepted Answer · 2008-11-04 02:23:14Z

9

XPath is a fairly standard way to access XML (and XHTML) nodes, and provides much more precision than CSS.

answered Nov 4, 2008 at 2:23

nickf

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10 Comments

eyelidlessness Over a year ago

+1 to bring to 0, but mainly because alternatives are always good.

nickf Over a year ago

wow, I was downvoted for this? I'm kinda interested as to why...

Wilco Over a year ago

Wasn't me the OP! :-) I actually think this would be the best alternative since XHTML is just a subset of XML.

troelskn Over a year ago

Sometimes people here are rather random. I agreed on XPath being a better tool to use, if it's available. It's standard, more powerful and quite similar to CSS-selectors anyway.

nickf Over a year ago

In CSS you couldn't do anything like "select the parent of a 'strong' tag"

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mario · Accepted Answer · 2010-06-20 00:58:42Z

6

Another one:
http://querypath.org/

answered Jun 20, 2010 at 0:58

mario

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1 Comment

Bobby Jack Over a year ago

Looks better than all the other options, to me - thanks!

hakre · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-14 11:42:20Z

6

A great one is a component of symfony 2, CssSelector\Parser^Introduction. It converts CSS selectors into XPath expressions. Take a look =)

Source code

edited Dec 14, 2011 at 11:42

hakre

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answered Jul 12, 2010 at 9:13

Clement Herreman

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Comments

Tobias Cudnik · Accepted Answer · 2009-01-22 16:00:48Z

5

For jQuery users most interesting may be port of jQuery to PHP, which is phpQuery. Almost all sections of the library are ported. Additionally it contains WebBrowser plugin, which can be used for Web Scraping whole site's path/processes (eg accessing data available after logging in). It simply simulates web browser on the server (events and cookies too). Latest versions has experimental support for XML namespaces and CSS3 "|" selector.

answered Jan 22, 2009 at 16:00

Tobias Cudnik

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Comments

Mirko · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-08 19:08:34Z

3

I ended up using PHP Query Lite, it's very simple and has all I need.

answered Feb 8, 2011 at 19:08

Mirko

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1 Comment

Richard Over a year ago

Downvoted because this doesn't appear to exist any more.

John · Accepted Answer · 2008-11-19 06:22:36Z

2

For document parsing I use DOM. This can quite easily solve your problem if you know the tag name (in this example "div"):

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

 $elements = $doc->getElementsByTagName("div");
 foreach ($elements as $e){
  if ($e->getAttribute("class")!="someclass") continue;

  //its a div.classname
 }

Not sure if DOM lets you get all elements of a document at once... you might have to do a tree traversal.

answered Nov 19, 2008 at 6:22

John

1 Comment

jaggedsoft Over a year ago

This method is the fastest of all I've tested. Another to consider is SmartDOMDocument

131 · Accepted Answer · 2009-07-28 14:27:38Z

1

I wrote mine, based on Mootools CSS selector engine http://selectors.svn.exyks.org/. it rely on simplexml extension ability (so, it's read-only)

answered Jul 28, 2009 at 14:27

131

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