DOMXpath - Get href attribute and text value of an a element

Question

So I have a HTML string like this:

   Some Name



        

Answer 1

Simplest way, evaluate is for this task!

The simplest way to obtain a value is by evaluate() method:

$xp = new DOMXPath($dom);
$v = $xp->evaluate("string(/etc[1]/@stringValue)");

Note: important to limit XPath returns to 1 item (the first a in this case), and cast the value with string() or round(), etc.

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So, in a set of multiple items, using your foreach code,

 $names = $domXpath->query("//td[@class='name']/");
 foreach($names as $contextNode) {
    $text = $domXpath->evaluate("string(./a[1])",$contextNode);
    $href = $domXpath->evaluate("string(./a[1]/@href)",$contextNode);
 }

PS: this example is only for evaluate's illustration... When the information already exists at the node, use what offers best performance, as methods getAttribute(), saveXML(), etc. and properties as $nodeValue, $textContent, etc. supplied by DOMNode.
See @Gordon's answer for this particular problem.
The XPath subquery (at context) is good for complex cases — or symplify your code, avoiding to check hasChildNodes() + loop for $childNodes, etc. with no significative gain in performance.