PHP XPATH within changing XML structure

Question

I've an XML file like this:

<tr class="station">  
  <td class="realtime"> 
    <span>
      15:11 
    </span>
  </td> 
</tr>

<tr class="station">  
  <td class="clock"> 
    15:20 
  </td> 
</tr>

<tr class="station">  
  <td class="clock"> 
    15:30 
  </td> 
</tr>

<tr class="station">  
  <td class="realtime"> 
    <span>
      15:41 
    </span>
  </td> 
</tr>

and I wanna parse it with xpath in php. The xml is been updated and parsed quite often.
I always want to get the first time (in this case 15:11)
The problem is that its not sure whether the surrounding tag is a td by class "clock" or "realtime".
If there is a so surrounding realtime, then there is a span tag within. Otherwise not.
In fact, its always the first "station"-class tag in which the information is, that matters. So is it possible to tell xpath to just evaluate within this tag?
Is there a good method for doing this in xpath?
(sry for my bad english)

There's no 15:11 in your sample? However, retrieving the first element would be trivial. If that's the complete snippet of HTML, just do //td for your xpath, which would return an array of all <td> elements, then retrieve the .innerTEXT of only the first entry in that array, which would be the very first 15:41 of your sample. — Marc B
– Marc B, Commented Feb 18, 2011 at 16:25
sry, ur right! the first "15:41" was meant to be "15:11". Corrected it. — Lars
– Lars, Commented Feb 21, 2011 at 6:20

user357812 · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-18 16:33:01Z

In fact, its always the first "station"-class tag in which the information is, that matters. So is it possible to tell xpath to just evaluate within this tag?

With this wellformed input source:

<table>
    <tr class="station">
        <td class="realtime">
            <span>
                15:41
            </span>
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="station">
        <td class="clock">
            15:20
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="station">
        <td class="clock">
            15:30
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="station">
        <td class="realtime">
            <span>
                15:41
            </span>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

This XPath expression:

/table/tr[@class='station'][1]/td

Note: Just select the element you want and use the proper DOM API method to get the string value. It doesn't matter whether there is a span element or not.

If you want to...

/table/tr[@class='station'][1]/td//text()

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