DOMDocument::loadHTML

(PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

DOMDocument::loadHTML — Load HTML from a string

Descrizione

public DOMDocument::loadHTML(string $source, int $options = 0): bool

The function parses the HTML contained in the string source. Unlike loading XML, HTML does not have to be well-formed to load.

Avviso

This function parses the input using an HTML 4 parser. The parsing rules of HTML 5, which is what modern web browsers use, are different. Depending on the input this might result in a different DOM structure. Therefore this function cannot be safely used for sanitizing HTML.

As an example, some HTML elements will implicitly close a parent element when encountered. The rules for automatically closing parent elements differ between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and thus the resulting DOM structure that DOMDocument sees might be different from the DOM structure a web browser sees, possibly allowing an attacker to break the resulting HTML.

Elenco dei parametri

source: The HTML string.
options: Bitwise OR of the libxml option constants.

Valori restituiti

Restituisce true in caso di successo, false in caso di fallimento.

Errori/Eccezioni

If an empty string is passed as the source, a warning will be generated. This warning is not generated by libxml and cannot be handled using libxml's error handling functions.

Anche se un HTML malformato potrebbe essere caricato con successo, questa funzione può generare errori E_WARNING quando incontra un markup errato. le funzioni di gestione errore di libxml possono essere usate per gestire questi errori.

Log delle modifiche

Versione	Descrizione
8.3.0	This function now has a tentative bool return type.
8.0.0	Calling this function statically will now throw an Error. Previously, an `E_DEPRECATED` was raised.

Esempi

Example #1 Creating a Document

<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML("<html><body>Test<br></body></html>");
echo $doc->saveHTML();
?>

Vedere anche:

DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile() - Load HTML from a file
DOMDocument::saveHTML() - Dumps the internal document into a string using HTML formatting
DOMDocument::saveHTMLFile() - Dumps the internal document into a file using HTML formatting

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User Contributed Notes 19 notes

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137

mdmitry at gmail dot com ¶

15 years ago


You can also load HTML as UTF-8 using this simple hack:

<?php

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML('<?xml encoding="UTF-8">' . $html);

// dirty fix
foreach ($doc->childNodes as $item)
    if ($item->nodeType == XML_PI_NODE)
        $doc->removeChild($item); // remove hack
$doc->encoding = 'UTF-8'; // insert proper

?>

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obayed dot opu at gmail dot com ¶

3 years ago


To support HTML5 you have to disable xml error handling by add `LIBXML_NOERROR` as an option of loadHTML method.

Example:

<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML("<html><body>Test<br><section>I'M UNSUPPORTED</section></body></html>", LIBXML_NOERROR);
echo $doc->saveHTML();
?>

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Shane Harter ¶

14 years ago


DOMDocument is very good at dealing with imperfect markup, but it throws warnings all over the place when it does. 

This isn't well documented here. The solution to this is to implement a separate aparatus for dealing with just these errors. 

Set libxml_use_internal_errors(true) before calling loadHTML. This will prevent errors from bubbling up to your default error handler. And you can then get at them (if you desire) using other libxml error functions. 

You can find more info here http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.libxml.php

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hanhvansu at yahoo dot com ¶

17 years ago


When using loadHTML() to process UTF-8 pages, you may meet the problem that the output of dom functions are not like the input. For example, if you want to get "Cạnh tranh", you will receive "Cáº¡nh tranh".  I suggest we use mb_convert_encoding before load UTF-8 page :

<?php

    $pageDom = new DomDocument();    

    $searchPage = mb_convert_encoding($htmlUTF8Page, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8"); 

    @$pageDom->loadHTML($searchPage);



?>

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bigtree at DONTSPAM dot 29a dot nl ¶

19 years ago


Pay attention when loading html that has a different charset than iso-8859-1. Since this method does not actively try to figure out what the html you are trying to load is encoded in (like most browsers do), you have to specify it in the html head. If, for instance, your html is in utf-8, make sure you have a meta tag in the html's head section:

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
</head>

If you do not specify the charset like this, all high-ascii bytes will be html-encoded. It is not enough to set the dom document you are loading the html in to UTF-8.

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deepakrajpal dot com at gmail dot com ¶

4 years ago


If we are loading html5 tags such as <section>, <svg> there is following error:

DOMDocument::loadHTML(): Tag section invalid in Entity

We can disable standard libxml errors (and enable user error handling) using libxml_use_internal_errors(true); before loadHTML();

This is quite useful in phpunit custom assertions as given in following example (if using phpunit test cases):

// Create a DOMDocument
$dom = new DOMDocument();

// fix html5/svg errors
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
        
// Load html 
$dom->loadHTML("<section></section>");
$htmlNodes = $dom->getElementsByTagName('section');

if ($htmlNodes->length == 0) {
    $this->assertFalse(TRUE);
} else {
    $this->assertTrue(TRUE);
}

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finkenb2 at mail dot lib dot msu dot edu ¶

9 years ago


Warning:  This does not function well with HTML5 elements such as SVG.  Most of the advice on the Web is to turn off errors in order to have it work with HTML5.

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fr at felix-riesterer dot de ¶

8 years ago


Remember: If you use an HTML5 doctype and a meta element like so

<meta charset=utf-8">

your HTML code will get interpreted as ISO-8859-something and non-ASCII chars will get converted into HTML entities. However the HTML4-like version will work (as has been pointed out 10 years ago by "bigtree at 29a"):

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

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cake at brothercake dot com ¶

12 years ago


Be aware that this function doesn't actually understand HTML -- it fixes tag-soup input using the general rules of SGML, so it creates well-formed markup, but has no idea which element contexts are allowed.

For example, with input like this where the first element isn't closed: 

    <span>hello <div>world</div>

loadHTML will change it to this, which is well-formed but invalid:

    <span>hello <div>world</div></span>

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Errol ¶

15 years ago


It should be noted that when any text is provided within the body tag

outside of a containing element, the DOMDocument will encapsulate that

text into a paragraph tag (<p>).



For example:

<?php

$doc = new DOMDocument();

$doc->loadHTML("<html><body>Test<br><div>Text</div></body></html>");

echo $doc->saveHTML();

?>



will yield:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">

<html><body>

<p>Test<br></p>

<div>Text</div>

</body></html>



while:

<?php

$doc = new DOMDocument();

$doc->loadHTML(

    "<html><body><i>Test</i><br><div>Text</div></body></html>");

echo $doc->saveHTML();

?>



will yield:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">

<html><body>

<i>Test</i><br><div>Text</div>

</body></html>

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kerim-yagmurcu at gmx dot de ¶

7 years ago


For those of you who want to get an external URL's class element, I have 2 usefull functions. In this example we get the '<h3 class="r">'
 elements back (search result headers) from google search:

1. Check the URL (if it is reachable, existing)
<?php
# URL Check
function url_check($url) { 
    $headers = @get_headers($url); 
    return is_array($headers) ? preg_match('/^HTTP\\/\\d+\\.\\d+\\s+2\\d\\d\\s+.*$/',$headers[0]) : false; 
};
?>

2. Clean the element you want to get (remove all tags, tabs, new-lines etc.)
<?php
# Function to clean a string
function clean($text){
    $clean = html_entity_decode(trim(str_replace(';','-',preg_replace('/\s+/S', " ", strip_tags($text)))));// remove everything
    return $clean;
    echo '\n';// throw a new line
}
?>

After doing that, we can output the search result headers with following method:
<?php
$searchstring = 'djceejay';
$url = 'http://www.google.de/webhp#q='.$searchstring;
if(url_check($url)){
    $doc = new DomDocument;
    $doc->validateOnParse = true;
    $doc->loadHtml(file_get_contents($url));
    $output = clean($doc->getElementByClass('r')->textContent);
    echo $output . '<br>';
}else{
    echo 'URL not reachable!';// Throw message when URL not be called
}
?>

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romain dot lalaut at laposte dot net ¶

17 years ago


Note that the elements of such document will have no namespace even with <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

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jamesedwardcooke+php at gmail dot com ¶

16 years ago


Using loadHTML() automagically sets the doctype property of your DOMDocument instance(to the doctype in the html, or defaults to 4.0 Transitional). If you set the doctype with DOMImplementation it will be overridden.

I assumed it was possible to set it and then load html with the doctype I defined(in order to decide the doctype at runtime), and ran into a huge headache trying to find out where my doctype was going. Hopefully this helps someone else.

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xuanbn at yahoo dot com ¶

17 years ago


If you use loadHTML() to process utf HTML string (eg in Vietnamese), you may experience result in garbage text, while some files were OK. Even your HTML already have meta charset  like

  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

I have discovered that, to help loadHTML() process utf file correctly, the meta tag should come first, before any utf string appear. For example, this HTML file

<html>
 <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    <title> Vietnamese - Tiếng Việt</title>
  </head>
<body></body>
</html>

will be OK with loadHTML() when <meta> tag appear <title> tag.

But the file below will not regcornize by loadHTML() because <title> tag contains utf string appear before <meta> tag.

<html>
 <head>
    <title> Vietnamese - Tiếng Việt</title>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
  </head>
<body></body>
</html>

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Alex ¶

14 years ago


Beware of the "gotcha" (works as designed but not as expected): if you use loadHTML, you cannot validate the document. Validation is only for XML. Details here: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=43771&edit=1

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piopier ¶

15 years ago


Here is a function I wrote to capitalize the previous remarks about charset problems (UTF-8...) when using loadHTML and then DOM functions.
It adds the charset meta tag just after <head> to improve automatic encoding detection, converts any specific character to an html entity, thus PHP DOM functions/attributes will return correct values.

<?php
mb_detect_order("ASCII,UTF-8,ISO-8859-1,windows-1252,iso-8859-15");
function loadNprepare($url,$encod='') {
        $content        = file_get_contents($url);
        if (!empty($content)) {
                if (empty($encod))
                        $encod  = mb_detect_encoding($content);
                $headpos        = mb_strpos($content,'<head>');
                if (FALSE=== $headpos)
                        $headpos= mb_strpos($content,'<HEAD>');
                if (FALSE!== $headpos) {
                        $headpos+=6;
                        $content = mb_substr($content,0,$headpos) . '<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset='.$encod.'">' .mb_substr($content,$headpos);
                }
                $content=mb_convert_encoding($content, 'HTML-ENTITIES', $encod);
        }
        $dom = new DomDocument;
        $res = $dom->loadHTML($content);
        if (!$res) return FALSE;
        return $dom;
}
?>

NB: it uses mb_strpos/mb_substr instead of mb_ereg_replace because that seemed more efficient with huge html pages.

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Anonymous ¶

2 years ago


loadHTML() & loadHTMLFile() may always generate warnings if the html include some tags such as "nav, section, footer, etc" adopted as of HTML5 (in PHP 8.1.6).

Try to run below.

<?php

$file_name = 'PHP Runtime Configuration - Manual.html'; // Download this file from "https://www.php.net/manual/en/session.configuration.php" in advance.

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTMLFile($file_name); // if set "LIBXML_NOERROR" as 2nd arg, no error
echo $doc->saveHTML();

// Warning: DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile(): Tag nav invalid in PHP Runtime Configuration - Manual.html, line: 63 in D:\xampp\htdocs\test\xml(dom)\loadHTML\index.php on line 6

?>

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BychkovVV at mail dot ru ¶

4 years ago


If you are loading html content from any website, in "utf-8" encoding, when meta width content-type is not first child of HEAD, it would not be acknowledged by parser (encoding); So you can make this fix:
  function domLoadHTML($html)
           {$testDOM = new DOMDocument('1.0', 'UTF-8');
            $testDOM->loadHTML($html);
            $charset = NULL;
            $searchInElemnt = function(&$item) use (&$searchInElemnt, &$charset)
              {if($item->childNodes)
                 {foreach($item->childNodes as $childItem)
                    {switch($childItem->nodeName)
                       {case 'html':
                        case 'head':
                          $searchInElemnt($childItem);
                          break;
                        case 'meta':
                          $attributes = array();
                          foreach ($childItem->attributes as $attr) 
                            {$attributes[mb_strtoupper($attr->localName)] = $attr->nodeValue;
                            }
                          if(array_key_exists('HTTP-EQUIV', $attributes) && (mb_strtoupper($attributes['HTTP-EQUIV']) == 'CONTENT-TYPE') && array_key_exists('CONTENT', $attributes) && preg_match('~[\s]*;[\s]*charset[\s]*=[\s]*([^\s]+)~', $attributes['CONTENT'], $matches))
                            {$charset = preg_replace('~[\s\']~', '', $matches[1]);
                            }
                       }
                    }
                 }
              };
            $searchInElemnt($testDOM);
            if(isset($charset))
              {$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0', $charset);
               $dom->loadHTML('<?xml encoding="'.$charset.'">'.$html);
               foreach ($dom->childNodes as $item)
               if($item->nodeType == XML_PI_NODE)
                 {$dom->removeChild($item);
                 }
               $dom->encoding = $charset;
              }
            else
              {$dom = $testDOM;                 
              }
            return $dom;
           };

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divinity76+spam at gmail dot com ¶

4 years ago


if you want to get rid of all the "DOMText elements containing ONLY whitespace", maybe try

<?php

function loadHTML_noemptywhitespace(string $html, int $extra_flags = 0, int $exclude_flags = 0): DOMDocument
{
    $flags = LIBXML_HTML_NODEFDTD | LIBXML_NOBLANKS | LIBXML_NONET;
    $flags = ($flags | $extra_flags) & ~ $exclude_flags;

    $domd = new DOMDocument();
    $domd->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
    @$domd->loadHTML('<?xml encoding="UTF-8">' . $html, $flags);
    $removeAnnoyingWhitespaceTextNodes = function (\DOMNode $node) use (&$removeAnnoyingWhitespaceTextNodes): void {
        if ($node->hasChildNodes()) {
            // Warning: it's important to do it backwards; if you do it forwards, the index for DOMNodeList might become invalidated;
            // that's why i don't use foreach() - don't change it (unless you know what you're doing, ofc)
            for ($i = $node->childNodes->length - 1; $i >= 0; --$i) {
                $removeAnnoyingWhitespaceTextNodes($node->childNodes->item($i));
            }
        }
        if ($node->nodeType === XML_TEXT_NODE && !$node->hasChildNodes() && !$node->hasAttributes() && empty(trim($node->textContent))) {
            //echo "Removing annoying POS";
            // var_dump($node);
            $node->parentNode->removeChild($node);
        } //elseif ($node instanceof DOMText) { echo "not removed"; var_dump($node, $node->hasChildNodes(), $node->hasAttributes(), trim($node->textContent)); }
    };
    $removeAnnoyingWhitespaceTextNodes($domd);
    return $domd;
}

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