PHP's DomElement->nodeValue has gobbly-gook

Question

I'm parsing a third-party web page using PHP's DOMElement controls. When I use the web page with my browser and view the source, it's clean, but when I access some of the nodes through the DOMElement->nodeValue parameter the HTML tags aren't there, and there are several newlines and this character Â. According to this answer , this is the character that shows up when there's an encoding issue.

I also get that gobbly-gook using:

• simplexml_import_dom($node)->asXML();
• $doc->saveXML($node);

My question is how I can simply get the clean HTML code inside the DOMElement?

Here is the clean HTML code:

<b>Author:</b> AUTHOR<br>
            <b>ISBN:</b> 9780684857220 <br>
            <b>Edition/Copyright:</b> 7<br>
            <b>Publisher:</b> J+M<br>
            <b>Published Date:</b>  1989<br>

Here is what nodeValue gives:

                    Â 
                    Author:Â AUTHOR      ISBN:Â 9780684857220 Edition/Copyright:Â 7     Publisher:Â J+M       Published Date:Â 
                    1989

Answer 1

Have you tried specifying the encoding when you create the DOM document? For example:

$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'utf-8');
$doc->loadXML($third_party_web_page_string);

or

$doc = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'iso-8859-1');
$doc->loadXML($third_party_web_page_string);

If neither of those work, you could try using the iconv function over the data before you load it into the DOM object.

Answer 2

Turns out it wasn't an encoding issue but rather I was using the wrong methods. This works:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->appendChild($doc->importNode($second_td,true)); 
echo $doc->saveHTML();