How to access an HTML attribute and retrieve data from it in PHP?

Question

I'm new to PHP and I would like to know how to retrieve data from an HTML element such as an src ?

It's very easy to do that in jQuery:

$('img').attr('src');

But I have no idea how to do it in PHP (if it is possible).

Here's an example I'm working on:

1. I loaded $result into SimpleXMLElement and stored it into $xml :

   $xml = simplexml_load_string($result) or die("Error: Cannot create object");

2. Then used foreach to loop over all elements:

    foreach($xml->links->link as $link){ echo 'Image: ' . $link->{'link-code-html'}[0] . '</br>'; // returns sometihing similar to: <a href='....'><img src='....'></a> }

3. Inside of the foreach I'm trying to access links ( src ) in img .

Is there a way to access src of the img nested inside of the a — clear when outputted to the screen:

    echo 'Image: ' . $link->{'link-code-html'}[0] . '</br>';

Answer 1

I would do this with the built-in DOMDocument and DOMXPath APIs, and then you can use the getAttribute method on any matching img node:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
// Load some example HTML. If you need to load from file, use ->loadHTMLFile
$doc->loadHTML("<a href='abc.com'><img src='ping1.png'></a>
                <a href='def.com'><img src='ping2.png'></a>
                <a href='ghi.com'>something else</a>");
$xpath = new DOMXpath($doc);
// Collect the images that are children of anchor elements
$imgs = $xpath->query("//a/img");

foreach($imgs as $img) {
    echo "Image: " . $img->getAttribute("src") . "\n";
}