[SOLVED] HTML Parsing

[rarebit]

Whats a standardly included way of parsing html / xml documents?

[.josh]

parse it for what?

[rhodesa]

If it's strict XML or XHTML, you can use any of the PHP XML Parsing packages. SimpleXML is by far the easiest. If it's just HTML from some page, in which you can't guarantee it's well formed, you will have to use regular expressions to strip out the data you want.

[rarebit]

Basically into some form of array so it can be studied for seo quality...

 

DOMDocument, Tidy and a few others don't seem to be installed on my server, so i'm currently having a look at XML Parser and simpleXML, but have also grabbed a few preg_split concoctions.

 

Any suggestions?

[rhodesa]

If you are just reading the content, SimpleXML is probably best. DomDocument becomes better when you are creating/manipulating complex XML files.

[rarebit]

How do you parse a definitely html page using SimpleXML, I keep getting errors...

 

$fn = "../test_pages/lq/index.html";
$s = file_get_contents($fn);

$dom = null;
try {
$dom = @new SimpleXMLElement($s);
} catch (Exception $e) {
echo "error";
}
print_r($dom);

[rarebit]

I used this as a base...

[rhodesa]

 $fn = "../test_pages/lq/index.html";
$s = file_get_contents($fn);
$dom = simplexml_load_string($s);
print_r($dom);

 

...but again...unless it's strict XHTML, it will error out