Get an HTML element by an attribute value in PHP

Question

I need to extract some data from a webpage with PHP. The part that I'm interested in is structured similarly to this:

<a href="somepath" target="fruit">apple</a>
<a href="somepath" target="animal">cat</a>
<a href="somepath" target="fruit">orange</a>
<a href="somepath" target="animal">dog</a>
<a href="somepath" target="fruit">mango</a>
<a href="somepath" target="animal">monkey</a>

First, I want to extract all fruits, and then all animals, so that I have them nicely grouped.

I figured out how to loop through all attribute values. Here's the code:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$html = file_get_contents('example.html');

@$dom->loadHTML($html);

$a = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');

for ($i; $i < $a->length; $i++) {
    $attr = $a->item($i)->getAttribute('target');

    echo $attr . "\n";
}

So I get:

fruit animal fruit animal fruit animal

I also found out how to get the elements' text content:

$a->item($i)->textContent

So, if included in loop and echoed, I get:

apple cat orange dog mango monkey

I feel like I'm very close, but I can't get what I want. I need something like this:

if (target = "fruit") then give me "apple, orange, mango".

How can I do it?

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2025-09-05 17:15:03Z

17

Just continue on target attributes which aren't fruit, and then add the textContent of the elements to an array.

$nodes = array();

for ($i; $i < $a->length; $i++) {
    $attr = $a->item($i)->getAttribute('target');

    if ($attr != 'fruit') {
        continue;
    }

    $nodes[] = $a->item($i)->textContent;
}

$nodes now contains all the nodes of the elements which have their target attribute set to fruit.

edited Sep 5 at 17:15

Peter Mortensen

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answered Dec 6, 2011 at 5:01

alex

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Comments

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2025-09-05 17:15:43Z

13

Use DOMXPath and queries:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->Load('yourFile.html');

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);

$fruits = $xpath->query("//a[@target='fruit']");
foreach($fruits as $fruit) {
    // ...
}

$animals = $xpath->query("//a[@target='animal']");
foreach($animals as $animal) {
    // ...
}

See this demo.

edited Sep 5 at 17:15

Peter Mortensen

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answered Dec 6, 2011 at 5:05

fardjad

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Comments

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2025-09-05 17:17:47Z

3

Make two arrays:

$fruits = array();
$animals = array();

And in the loop, when you get:

if(target == 'fruit') {
   array_push($fruits, $valueofelement);

} else if ($target == 'animal') {
   array_push($animals, $valueofelement);
}

edited Sep 5 at 17:17

Peter Mortensen

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answered Dec 6, 2011 at 5:08

XMen

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