I've used DOM before to parse websites in PHP.
I know I should never try to parse HTML using regex.
But... (I don't want to start a shitstorm, just an answer :P )
If i want to parse just 1 HTML element, e.g.
<a href="http://example.com/something?id=1212132131133&filter=true" rel="blebeleble" target="_blank">
And find the content of the href attribute, can I (and probably I need to if I can) use DOM to parse this string or do I need a complete webpage to be able to parse it using the DOM?
Yes, you can do this.
You have to:
<a /> tag constitutes the whole document;& with &, the proper HTML entity).Code:
<?php
$str = '<a href="http://example.com/something?id=1212132131133&filter=true" rel="blebeleble" target="_blank" />';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadXML($str);
var_dump($dom->childNodes->item(0)->attributes->getNamedItem('href')->value);
// Output: string(57) "http://example.com/something?id=1212132131133&filter=true"
?>
PS, if you want to include the link text, that's ok too:
$str = '<a href="http://example.com/something?id=1212132131133&filter=true" rel="blebeleble" target="_blank">Click here!</a>';
// .. code .. //
// Output: string(57) "http://example.com/something?id=1212132131133&filter=true"
You can easily adapt a regex to parse just this tag, given you've isolated it. An example can be found here. It's for java, so remember to change the case insensitive modifier to the end!
