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phpdomxpath

domxpath - Extract li tags from second ul

I am trying to extract only the second ul's li tags from the following. Unfortunately, there are no classes or ids in the html to help

<ul>
    <li>Some text</li>
    <li>Some text</li>
    <li>Some text</li>
</ul>

<ul>
    <li>Some more text</li>
    <li>Some more text</li>
    <li>Some more text</li>
</ul>

I have tried (a few things, actually):

    $ul = $xpath->query('//ul')->item(1);
    $query = '/li';
    $lis = $xpath->evaluate($query, $ul);

Thinking this will get me the second ul, and then I can extract from there. It does get me the second ul's html, but I'm obviously misunderstanding something with `->evaluate? because my li's are all the li's, not just from the second ul.

Solution

  • You can directly access them using XPath:

    $xpath->query('//ul[2]/li');

    Example:

    $html = <<<EOF
<ul>
    <li>Some text</li>
    <li>Some text</li>
    <li>Some text</li>
</ul>

<ul>
    <li>Some more text</li>
    <li>Some more text</li>
    <li>Some more text</li>
</ul>
EOF;

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($html);

$selector = new DOMXpath($doc);

// iterate through them...
foreach($selector->query('//ul[2]/li') as $li) {
    echo $li->nodeValue . PHP_EOL;
}

    ~