在PHP中从XML内部解析HTML标记

Question

I'm trying to create my own RSS feed (learning purposes) using simplexml_load_string while parsing http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rss in PHP. I get stuck at reading the HTML tags inside the <description> tag.

My code so far looks like this:

$feed = file_get_contents('http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rss');
$rss = simplexml_load_string($feed);

//for each element in the feed
foreach ($rss->channel->item as $item) {
    echo '<h3>'. $item->title . '</h3>'; 

        foreach($item->description as $desc){

             //how to read the href from the a tag???

             //this does not work at all
             $tags = $item->xpath('//a');
             foreach ($tags as $tag) {
                 echo $tag['href'];
             }
       }
}

Any ideas how to extract each HTML tag?

Thanks

Answer 1

The description content has its special characters encoded, so it's not treated as nodes within the XML, rather it's just a string. You can decode the special characters, then load the HTML into DOMDocument and do whatever you want to do. For example:

foreach ($rss->channel->item as $item) {
    echo '<h3>'. $item->title . '</h3>'; 

        foreach($item->description as $desc){

            $dom = new DOMDocument();
            $dom->loadHTML(htmlspecialchars_decode((string)$desc));

            $anchors = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
            echo $anchors->item(0)->getAttribute('href');
        }
}

XPath is also available for use with DOMDocument, see DOMXPath.