How to output plain text with php DOMDocument?

Question

I'm using this code (thank you Lawrence ) to parse HTML table:

<?php
$html = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com');
$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($html);

//TUE 1 1 4.37 6.39 1.08 5.35 9.18 6.00 1.30 6.30 7.42 9.40                 
echo '
<table>
    <tr>';
foreach($dom->getElementsByTagName('table') as $table) {
    echo innerHTML($table->getElementsByTagName('tr')->item(9));
}
echo '
    </tr>
</table>';

function innerHTML($current){
    $ret = "";
    $nodes = @$current->childNodes;
    if(!empty($nodes)){
        foreach($nodes as $v){
            $tmp = new DOMDocument();
            $tmp->appendChild($tmp->importNode($v, true));
            $ret .= $tmp->saveHTML();
        }
        return $ret;
    }
    return;
}
?>

The problem is that it outputs original HTML code, so how can I output plain text?

I have tried these changes, but it didn't work:

return $ret->textContent;
return $ret->nodeValue;
return $ret->plaintext;

echo innerHTML($table->getElementsByTagName('tr')->item(9)->textContent);
echo innerHTML($table->getElementsByTagName('tr')->item(9)->nodeValue);
echo innerHTML($table->getElementsByTagName('tr')->item(9)->plaintext);

Answer 1

The solution is actually very simple - strip_tags function.

echo strip_tags(innerHTML($table->getElementsByTagName('tr')->item(9)));

It takes the value and removes all of the HTML code, which results in plain text value.

Answer 2

html2text library will convert your html content to text, It uses PHP's DOM methods, and iterate all the elements and extract text from given HTML

Usage:

$text = convert_html_to_text($html);