Get the inner text using curl concept in php

Question

This is html text in the website, i want to grab

1,000 Places To See Before You Die

<ul class="listings">
<li>
<a href="http://watchseries.eu/serie/1,000_places_to_see_before_you_die" title="1,000 Places To See Before You Die">
1,000 Places To See Before You Die
<span class="epnum">2009</span>
</a>
</li>

I used the code like this

foreach($html->find('ul.listings li a') as $e)
echo $e->innertext. '<br/>';

The output i am getting is like

 999: Whats Your Emergency<span class="epnum">2012</span> 

including the span pls help me this

Answer 1

You can use strip_tags() for that

echo trim(strip_tags($e->innertext));

Or try to use preg_replace() to remove unwanted tag and its content

echo preg_replace('/<span[^>]*>([\s\S]*?)<\/span[^>]*>/', '', $e->innertext);

Answer 2

There are 2 ways that I could think of to solve this. One, is that you grab the title attribute from the anchor tag. Of course, not everyone set up a title attribute for the anchor tag and the value of the attribute could be different if they want to fill it that way. The other solution is that, you get the innertext attribute and then replace every child of the anchor tag with an empty value.

So, either do this

$e->title;

or this

$text = $e->innertext;
foreach ($e->children() as $child)
{
    $text = str_replace($child, '', $text);
}

Though, it might be a good idea to use DOMDocument instead for this.

Answer 3

Why not DOMDocument and get title attribute?:

$string = '<ul class="listings">
<li>
<a href="http://watchseries.eu/serie/1,000_places_to_see_before_you_die" title="1,000 Places To See Before You Die">
1,000 Places To See Before You Die
<span class="epnum">2009</span>
</a>
</li>';

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($string);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$text = $xpath->query('//ul[@class="listings"]/li/a/@title')->item(0)->nodeValue;
echo $text;

or

$text = explode("\n", trim($xpath->query('//ul[@class="listings"]/li/a')->item(0)->nodeValue));
echo $text[0];

Codepad Example

Answer 4

First of all check your html. Now it is like

  $string = '<ul class="listings">
               <li>
                  <a href="http://watchseries.eu/serie/1,000_places_to_see_before_you_die" title="1,000 Places To See Before You Die">
 1,000 Places To See Before You Die
                    <span class="epnum">2009</span>
                 </a>
             </li>';

There is no close tag for ul, perhaps you missed it.

  $string = '<ul class="listings">
               <li>
                  <a href="http://watchseries.eu/serie/1,000_places_to_see_before_you_die" title="1,000 Places To See Before You Die">
 1,000 Places To See Before You Die
                    <span class="epnum">2009</span>
                 </a>
             </li>
            </ul>';

Try like this

 $xml = simplexml_load_string($string);
 echo $xml->li->a['title'];

Answer 5

Use plaintext instead.

echo $e->plaintext;

But still the year will be present which you can trim off using regexp.

Example from the documentation here:

$html = str_get_html("<div>foo <b>bar</b></div>");
$e = $html->find("div", 0);

echo $e->tag; // Returns: " div"
echo $e->outertext; // Returns: " <div>foo <b>bar</b></div>"
echo $e->innertext; // Returns: " foo <b>bar</b>"
echo $e->plaintext; // Returns: " foo bar"