DOMDocument-&gt;loadHTML

DOMDocument->loadHTML

ossigeno

This is a useful function in that it allows working with html code that is not well-formed. However it insists on wrapping html and body tags around the html if they don't already have these tags. This means this function is useless to append a html snippet to another DOMDocument as you end up with nested html and body tags inside existing html and body tags

Example

Say you had a DOMDocument as:
<html>
<head>
<title>Document 1</title>
<head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

and wanted to append this html inside the body
<h1>Hello</h1>

DOMDocument->loadHTML insists the snippet should really be
<html>
<body>
<h1>Hello</h1>
</body>
</html>

So you end up with
<html>
<head>
<title>Document 1</title>
<head>
<body>
<html>
<body>
<h1>Hello</h1>
</body>
</html>
</body>
</html>

thorpe

thanks for pointing that out.

ossigeno

This is ALL PHP 5 functionality

<?php
// load our html page into a DOM
$pageDOM = DOMDocument::loadHTML("[html template as string]");
// OR load from a file
$pageDOM = DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile("[filepath]");

// load our html snippet into a DOM
// this may have been calculated or retrieved from a database, etc
$snippetDOM = DOMDocument::loadHTML("<h2>Hello</h2>");

// we now can import the snippet into the Page DOM

// PREVIOUS METHOD
// to append the snippet DOM root node, we would use
// $snippetNode = $snippetDOM->documentElement;
// BUT this gives us the nested <html><body> tags

// SOLUTION
// instead of appending the document element of the snippet
// we need to transverse the DOM to get the first (and only) child node of the <body>
$xpath = "/html/body/child::node()[1]";
$DOMXPath1 = new DOMXPath($snippetDOM);
$snippetNode = $DOMXPath->query($xpath)->item(0);
// we now have a reference to the snippet!

//locate the target node in the page DOM
$DOMXPath2 = new DOMXPath($pageDOM);
$targetNode = $DOMXPath2->query("xpath to node to append snippet")->item(0);

// import our snippet node into this DOM
$importedSnippetNode = $pageDOM->importNode($snippetNode, true);
// and append to our child
$targetNode->appendChild($importedSnippetNode);

//flush page DOM to browser
echo $pageDOM->saveHTML();
?>