Simple HTML DOM - Child Selectors (CSS)

Question

I am trying to select a (direct) child of parents div.element using the > combinator, but it's failing.

HTML:

<div class="element">
    <p>test</p>
</div>

<div class="element">
    <div class="selected">
        <p>test2</p>
    </div>
</div>

PHP:

$html->find('div.element > p', 0);

I am looking to select the direct p element.

If it's a nested descendant - it shouldn't return anything, but it returns test2.

How can I write it to return test, but not test2? Thanks

UPDATE: The general consensus here on SO seems to be that Simple HTML DOM is bad. I ended up writing my code using PHP's DOMDocument as suggested by Phil. I did test out nevermind's solution and it did work as well. Thanks for all the help and Happy Coding

@aldrin27 that at least changed behavior. On the second element, it seems to return an empty string. I though it returned null if the element wasn't found. Also, specifying element index in the find call makes it look deeper? — RisingSun, Aug 13 '15 at 00:25
SimpleHTMLDom is a truly terrible library and I doubt it supports the immediate child selector. See this page for a list of **much better** alternatives ~ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3577641/how-do-you-parse-and-process-html-xml-in-php — Phil, Aug 13 '15 at 00:27
@Phil I would love to just drop this thing and move on to another but it is not up to me and there already is a lot of code written using this. My only option is to try and work with what I have already. — RisingSun, Aug 13 '15 at 00:29
FYI, this XPath expression will yield the result you're after ~ `//div[@class = 'element']/p` — Phil, Aug 13 '15 at 00:30
@khuderm you can use something else for this task (I recommend the built-in Dom extension). It doesn't mean you need to drop SimpleHTMLDom or refactor any other code — Phil, Aug 13 '15 at 00:32
@Phil You are right. I wasted too much time trying to make this work. I wrote only this part using php `DOMDocument` and that was like a breeze. If you wanna make your comment an answer, I will accept it. I try to stay away from xpath, personally. They tend to break easily with the smallest structure change. — RisingSun, Aug 13 '15 at 00:51
For a simple html dom replacement with full css support [try this](https://github.com/monkeysuffrage/advanced_html_dom). Yes simple html dom is bad but it's also a very old library and for a while it was all we had. — pguardiario, Aug 13 '15 at 23:36

sinisake · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-13T00:56:17.820

2

Well, this should (must, actually:)) work (tested on 4 divs):

foreach($html->find('div.element') as $element) {


$paragraph=$element->find('p',0);

    if($paragraph==$element->first_child())
    echo $paragraph;

}

edited Aug 13 '15 at 00:56

answered Aug 13 '15 at 00:37

sinisake

11,240
2
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27

I did test out your code after I found my solution. Not sure why you deleted your answer in the first place lol. I ended up doing what @Phil suggested. If he doesn't write an answer, I will choose your as a solution since it works as well. Thanks – RisingSun Aug 13 '15 at 01:02
Np, first solution didn't worked for two
adjacent tags (if it is possible in your HTML structure) - IF you just want first... :)
– sinisake Aug 13 '15 at 01:04
That would have worked in my case. The first element with just the span is sometimes there and sometimes not. If it was there, I needed the value inside it only. If it didn't I wanted the value from the second element. Anyway, thank you very much for your help! – RisingSun Aug 13 '15 at 01:09

Simple HTML DOM - Child Selectors (CSS)

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