PHP5 HTML DOM

**gberz3** · September 12th, 2006, 05:50 PM

Hi All,

Quick question regarding PHP5's newest DOM abilities. They include HTML, and while it's possible (with a little finagling) to obtain, say, a specific DIV by it's 'id', it seems nearly impossible (short of looping through the items attributes and children) to output it's EXACT contents. Meaning, if a DIV looks like so:

Code:

<div id='my_div'>
<table>
   some table related stuff
</table>
</div>

. . .I want it to output exactly that, not just "some table related stuff". I'd like to be able to retrieve the full DIV. If I load the document into a new DOMDocument and perform DOMDocument->saveHTML() it outputs the exact item, but for some reason DOMElements and DOMNodes don't support saveHTML(). Anyone familiar with the PHP5 DOM HTML items have any suggestions?

FYI, my ultimate goal is to be able to "screen scrape" based on a DOMElement's 'id'. I've been using Regular Expressions to accomplish this, and, while very handy, I'd rather be 100% sure I'm getting what I ask for based on a specific 'id' rather than having to try and parse with RegEx.

Thanks in advance!