[RESOLVED] What is the best way to remove an entire element and its contents from a page?

The-Master

I obtain the page via cURL so I have no control over it but I want to remove and element and its contents, say <div1> in the following:

<body>This is a page.<div1>This is some rubbish information</div1> This is useful information.</body>

So that it output:

<body>This is a page. This is useful information.</body>

Thanks in advance.

Jack_McSlay

I don't see what kind of logic you can apply to remove useless information without removing important information as well, but you should look up onpreg_replace()

NogDog

If there is a way to uniquely identify that HTML element, you could use your CSS stylesheet to set "display: none;" for that element.

Valdhor

This seems like the perfect use for DOM functions.

This cide will do what you want:

$string = "<body>This is a page.<div1>This is some rubbish information</div1> This is useful information.</body>";

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML($string);

$docElement = $doc->documentElement;
$div = $docElement->getElementsByTagName('div1')->item(0);
$olddiv = $docElement->removeChild($div);

echo $doc->saveHTML();

The-Master

Wow! I didn't even realise that there were DOM functions in PHP. Thanks very much for that!!!

I would have used css but that would have increased the size of the page. It would also make the site less 'neat' and the errors caused by the bits I don't need would still be there. Thanks very much though.