On the PHP::Impact blog today Federico points out a few HTML DOM parsers that work similar to jQuery:

• the Simple HTML DOM Parser
• Zend_Dom_Query
• phpQuery

Check out a previous tutorial of his for more information on using DOM parsers to scrape information from remote sites.

On the Developer Tutorials blog today Akash Mehta looks at screen scraping using a simple DOM library to help make it easy.

In PHP, regular expressions tend to get rather messy, DOM calls can be confusing and verbose, and often the string functions just aren't enough. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use the middle ground - the open source PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser library, which provides jQuery-grade awesomeness for easy screen scraping without messy regular expressions.

In his examples he shows how to grab the contents of a page (google.com), find and replace information in the HTML and perform a query on the data (like finding each of the news stories out of the front page of slashdot.org).

Kae Verans has written up a handy snippet of code to try to mimic the innerHTML property that Javascript lets you have access to.

DOM does not officially have an innerHTML parameter, but it's incredibly useful. I found a need for something similar when working on some DOM stuff, so had to write a version.

Technically it's an "outerHTML" not inner, but it works about the same. The code and an example of its use is included.

In trying to convert over several HTML pages to the DITA XML format, James Edwards came up against a problem involving recursion:

But a problem I came across several times was the sheer complexity of recursive element conversion '" <code> becomes <jsvalue> (or one of a dozen similar elements), <a> becomes <xref> '¦ and that's all simple enough; but each of these elements might contain the other, or further child elements like <em>, and as we walk through the DOM so the incidence of potential recursion increases, until it gets to the point where my brain explodes.

His solution involves working with both regular expressions and document fragments. He loads the node he wants to work with, its parsed to prepare it and is passed off to do the "text-based mangling" to update it. The result is them pushed back into an XML object (fragment) and this is pushed back into the main document with a replaceChild call.

Michael has posted a simple script today that takes in XML data and spits back out an array on the other side:

The function takes the specified XML data (which must be in valid XML format) and converts into an array. Any attributes in the XML elements are dropped an only the element values are placed in the array.

The code uses a combination of XPath, DOM, and regular expressions to parse the given XML content.

Greg Szorc shows how, in this entry on his blog, to use DTDs and catalogs to validate your XHTML pages with a little help from PHP.

This [validation from an external site like the W3C validator] approach is a good start, but it is far from ideal because it is based on an honor system of sorts. You often forget to validate each change you make and there is always some corner case that you forget. So, what can be done about it? Well, if you find yourself developing in PHP, you can employ the following solution.

The code he includes pulls in the XHTML content from your page (or the output of the framework's view layer) and pushes it into a DOMDocument that's build with the LIBXML_DTDLOAD and LIBXML_DTDATTR options.

Alejandro Gervasio has finished up his series on DevShed looking at working with the DOM extension in PHP5 with this new article, a look at parsing child nodes.

In this last chapter of the series, I'm going to teach you how to handle the child nodes of an XML document by way of two simple methods, called hasChildNode() and removeChild() respectively. So let's not waste any more time in preliminaries and learn how to use them in a helpful way.

They review some of the concepts mentioned previously before moving ahead to the use of the hasChildNodes and removeChild methods to check for children and get rid of only certain ones.

DevShed continues their series about working with XML in PHP's DOM extension with this new tutorial posted today showing how to get at attributes for tags and cloning nodes from others.

You've probably realized that the DOM XML library can be pretty useful when working with web documents. However, this extension includes some other methods, which can be utilized to parse attributes of a given XML string, as well as to clone nodes.

They show how to use the getAttributes method, hasAttribue method and cloneNode method to work with their XML examples.

On DevShed today, they continue their series looking at working with XML in PHP with the DOM functionality with the fifth part of their series, a look at working with HTML strings and file data.

Understanding how to use the methods and properties provided by this library requires a little effort from you, despite its fairly easy learning curve. [...] The DOM XML extension has plenty of options when it comes to moving portions of an XML document (or even the entire document) from one place to another. This is certainly a process that can be performed with minor hassles by utilizing the intuitive DOM API mentioned in the beginning.

They show how to use loadHTML to pull in the text from an HTML string and use loadHTMLFile to pull it in from an external HTML file. Finally, they show how to write the data and whatever changes you might have made to it, back out to a file with saveHTMLFile.

DevShed has posted the fourth part of their series looking at working with the DOM functionality of PHP5, this time with a focus on working with multiple document nodes inside of an XML document.

It's time to learn a few other methods included with the DOM XML extension. Based upon this premise, in this fourth tutorial I'm going to show you how to get access to multiple nodes of an XML document, either for internal processing or simply for echoing to the browser.

They show you how to grab the collection of nodes to work with and how to grab data from an XML text file with load() and loadXML().