How to Extract Text from Specific HTML Tags Using DOMDocument and XPath?

Parsing HTML with PHP's DOMDocument and XPath

When attempting to parse HTML using PHP's DOMDocument, a common issue is finding specific text within tags of particular classes. Using DOMDocument::getElementsByTagName alone may not suffice in such cases.

To capture specific text within tags of a target class, an alternative approach utilizing DOMDocument and DOMXPath is recommended. DOMXPath allows for powerful XPath queries to locate elements based on their attributes and structure.

Consider the following HTML:

<div class="main">
    <div class="text">
    Capture this text 1
    </div>
</div>

<div class="main">
    <div class="text">
    Capture this text 2
    </div>
</div>

To retrieve the text within the

php
$html = <<loadHTML($html);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);

$tags = $xpath->query('//div[@class="main"]/div[@class="text"]');
foreach ($tags as $tag) {
    var_dump(trim($tag->nodeValue));
}

string 'Capture this text 1' (length=19)
string 'Capture this text 2' (length=19)