How can I get an element's serialised HTML with PHP's DOMDocument?

Question

This is my example script:

$html = <<
    

    Capture this text 1
    
    &l         


        

Answer 1

try this

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);

$tags = $xpath->query('//div[@class="main"]');

foreach ($tags as $tag) {
    $innerHTML = '';

    $children = $tag->childNodes;
    foreach ($children as $child) {
        $tmp_doc = new DOMDocument();
        $tmp_doc->appendChild($tmp_doc->importNode($child,true));       
        $innerHTML .= $tmp_doc->saveHTML();
    }

    var_dump(trim($innerHTML));
}

-Pascal MARTIN

Answer 2

Well, nodeValue will give you the node's value. You want what's commonly called outerHTML

echo $dom->saveXml($tag);

will output what you are looking for in an X(HT)ML compliant way.

---

As of PHP 5.3.6 you can also pass a node to saveHtml, which wasnt possible previously:

echo $dom->saveHtml($tag);

The latter will obey HTML4 syntax. Thanks to Artefacto for that.