Finding and Printing all Links within a DIV

Question

I am trying to find all links in a div and then printing those links.

I am using the Simple HTML Dom to parse the HTML file. Here is what I have so far, please read the inline comments and let me know where I am going wrong.

include('simple_html_dom.php');  

$html = file_get_html('tester.html');

$articles = array();

//find the div the div with the id abcde
foreach($html->find('#abcde') as $article) {

    //find all a tags that have a href in the div abcde
    foreach($article->find('a[href]') as $link){

        //if the href contains singer then echo this link
        if(strstr($link, 'singer')){

            echo $link;

        }

    }

}

What currently happens is that the above takes a long time to load (never got it to finish). I printed what it was doing in each loop since it was too long to wait and I find that its going through things I don't need it to! This suggests my code is wrong.

The HTML is basically something like this:

<div id="abcde">
<!-- lots of html elements -->
<!-- lots of a tags -->
<a href="singer/tom" />
<img src="image..jpg" />
</a>
</div>

Thanks all for any help

Answer 1

Why don't you use the built-in DOM extension instead?

<?php

$cont = file_get_contents("http://stackoverflow.com/") or die("1");

$doc = new DOMDocument();
@$doc->loadHTML($cont) or die("2");

$nodes = $doc->getElementsByTagName("a");

for ($i = 0; $i < $nodes->length; $i++) {
    $el = $nodes->item($i);
    if ($el->hasAttribute("href"))
        echo "- {$el->getAttribute("href")}\n";
}

gives

... (lots of links before) ...
- http://careers.stackoverflow.com
- http://serverfault.com
- http://superuser.com
- http://meta.stackoverflow.com
- http://www.howtogeek.com
- http://doctype.com
- http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/
- http://www.peakinternet.com/business/hosting/colocation-dedicated#
- http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/
- http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/

Answer 2

The correct way to select a div (or whatever) by ID using that API is:

$html->find('div[id=abcde]');

Also, since IDs are supposed to be unique, the following should suffice:

//find all a tags that have a href in the div abcde
$article = $html->find('div[id=abcde]', 0);

foreach($article->find('a[href]') as $link){

    //if the href contains singer then echo this link
    if(strstr($link, 'singer')){
        echo $link;
    }
}