Using domDocument, and parsing info, I would like to get the 'href' contents of an 'a' tag

Question

This displays the what is between the a tag, but I would like a way to get the href contents as well.

Is there a way to do that using the domDocument?

$html = file_get_contents($uri);
$html = utf8_decode($html);

/*** a new dom object ***/
$dom = new domDocument;

/*** load the html into the object ***/
@$dom->loadHTML($html);

/*** discard white space ***/
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;

/*** the table by its tag name ***/
$tables = $dom->getElementsByTagName('table');

/*** get all rows from the table ***/
$rows = $tables->item(0)->getElementsByTagName('tr');

/*** loop over the table rows ***/
foreach ($rows as $row)
{
    $a = $row->getElementsByTagName('a');
    /*** echo the values ***/
    echo $a->item(0)->nodeValue.'<br />';
    echo '<hr />';
}

Answer 1

You're mere inches away from the answer -- you've already extracted the <a> tags inside your foreach loop. You're grabbing all of them in a DOMNodeList, so each item in that list will be an instance of DOMElement, which has a method called getAttribute.

$a->item(0)->getAttribute('href') will contain the string value of the href attribute. Tada!

---

It's possible that you might get an empty node list. You can work around this by checking that the first item in the list is an element.

$href = null;
$first_anchor_tag = $a->item(0);
if($first_anchor_tag instanceof DOMElement)
    $href = $first_anchor_tag->getAttribute('href');