I have a set of html strings that can look like this:
<div id="myelementID" class="hello" data-foo="bar"> ... </div>
or
<div id="myelementID" class="world" data-this="that"> ... </div>
etc etc, you get the idea. Except for id="myelementID", every other attribute else is not fixed.
What I need is to extract the exact string of the the <div>, eg. <div id="myelementID" class="hello" data-foo="bar"> if an element with the ID "myelementID" exists.
As of now, I'm able to use DomDocument to check if the element exists:
$dom = new DomDocument;
$dom->validateOnParse = true;
$internalErrors = libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$dom->loadHTML($html_string);
libxml_use_internal_errors($internalErrors);
$el = $dom->getElementById("myelementID");
From here, how can I get the element's HTML string? I'm open to using preg_match as well, which may be an even better solution.
edit
Just to be clearer, I'm not looking for the content of the element. I'm looking for the string <div id="myelementID" etc="etc" this="that">. Because it's not certain what attributes the element has apart from the fact that it's ID is "myelementID", that's why I'm having the problem.
Use DOMNode::C14N method to canonicalize nodes to a string, substr and strpos functions to get the needed fragment :
...
$el = $dom->getElementById("myelementID");
$elString = $el->C14N();
var_dump(substr($elString, 0, strpos($elString, '>') + 1));
The output (for your example):
string(51) "<div class="hello" data-foo="bar" id="myelementID">"