The DOMNode class

(PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

Class synopsis

class DOMNode {
/* Properties */
public readonly string $nodeName;
public readonly int $nodeType;
public readonly ?DOMNode $parentNode;
public readonly ?DOMElement $parentElement;
public readonly DOMNodeList $childNodes;
public readonly ?DOMNode $firstChild;
public readonly ?DOMNode $lastChild;
public readonly ?DOMNode $previousSibling;
public readonly ?DOMNode $nextSibling;
public readonly ?DOMNamedNodeMap $attributes;
public readonly bool $isConnected;
public readonly ?DOMDocument $ownerDocument;
public readonly ?string $namespaceURI;
public string $prefix;
public readonly ?string $localName;
public readonly ?string $baseURI;
/* Methods */
public C14N(
    bool $exclusive = false,
    bool $withComments = false,
    ?array $xpath = null,
    ?array $nsPrefixes = null
): string|false
public C14NFile(
    string $uri,
    bool $exclusive = false,
    bool $withComments = false,
    ?array $xpath = null,
    ?array $nsPrefixes = null
): int|false
public cloneNode(bool $deep = false): DOMNode|false
public getLineNo(): int
public getRootNode(?array $options = null): DOMNode
public insertBefore(DOMNode $node, ?DOMNode $child = null): DOMNode|false
public isDefaultNamespace(string $namespace): bool
public isEqualNode(?DOMNode $otherNode): bool
public isSameNode(DOMNode $otherNode): bool
public isSupported(string $feature, string $version): bool
public lookupPrefix(string $namespace): ?string
public normalize(): void
public replaceChild(DOMNode $node, DOMNode $child): DOMNode|false
}

Properties

nodeName

Returns the most accurate name for the current node type

nodeValue

The value of this node, depending on its type. Contrary to the W3C specification, the node value of DOMElement nodes is equal to DOMNode::textContent instead of null.

nodeType

Gets the type of the node. One of the predefined XML_xxx_NODE constants

parentNode

The parent of this node. If there is no such node, this returns null.

parentElement

The parent element of this element. If there is no such element, this returns null.

childNodes

A DOMNodeList that contains all children of this node. If there are no children, this is an empty DOMNodeList.

firstChild

The first child of this node. If there is no such node, this returns null.

lastChild

The last child of this node. If there is no such node, this returns null.

previousSibling

The node immediately preceding this node. If there is no such node, this returns null.

nextSibling

The node immediately following this node. If there is no such node, this returns null.

attributes

A DOMNamedNodeMap containing the attributes of this node (if it is a DOMElement) or null otherwise.

isConnected

Whether the node is connected to a document

ownerDocument

The DOMDocument object associated with this node, or null if this node is a DOMDocument

namespaceURI

The namespace URI of this node, or null if it is unspecified.

prefix

The namespace prefix of this node.

localName

Returns the local part of the qualified name of this node.

baseURI

The absolute base URI of this node or null if the implementation wasn't able to obtain an absolute URI.

textContent

The text content of this node and its descendants.

Changelog

Version Description
8.3.0 Properties DOMNode::$parentElement, and DOMNode::$isConnected have been added.
8.0.0 The unimplemented methods DOMNode::compareDocumentPosition(), DOMNode::isEqualNode(), DOMNode::getFeature(), DOMNode::setUserData() and DOMNode::getUserData() have been removed.

Notes

Note:

The DOM extension uses UTF-8 encoding. Use mb_convert_encoding(), UConverter::transcode(), or iconv() to handle other encodings.

Table of Contents

add a note

User Contributed Notes 14 notes

up
40
marc at ermshaus dot org
15 years ago
It took me forever to find a mapping for the XML_*_NODE constants. So I thought, it'd be handy to paste it here:

1 XML_ELEMENT_NODE
2 XML_ATTRIBUTE_NODE
3 XML_TEXT_NODE
4 XML_CDATA_SECTION_NODE
5 XML_ENTITY_REFERENCE_NODE
6 XML_ENTITY_NODE
7 XML_PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE
8 XML_COMMENT_NODE
9 XML_DOCUMENT_NODE
10 XML_DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE
11 XML_DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE
12 XML_NOTATION_NODE
up
23
David Rekowski
14 years ago
You cannot simply overwrite $textContent, to replace the text content of a DOMNode, as the missing readonly flag suggests. Instead you have to do something like this:

<?php

$node
->removeChild($node->firstChild);
$node->appendChild(new DOMText('new text content'));

?>

This example shows what happens:

<?php

$doc
= DOMDocument::loadXML('<node>old content</node>');
$node = $doc->getElementsByTagName('node')->item(0);
echo
"Content 1: ".$node->textContent."\n";

$node->textContent = 'new content';
echo
"Content 2: ".$node->textContent."\n";

$newText = new DOMText('new content');

$node->appendChild($newText);
echo
"Content 3: ".$node->textContent."\n";

$node->removeChild($node->firstChild);
$node->appendChild($newText);
echo
"Content 4: ".$node->textContent."\n";

?>

The output is:

Content 1: old content // starting content
Content 2: old content // trying to replace overwriting $node->textContent
Content 3: old contentnew content // simply appending the new text node
Content 4: new content // removing firstchild before appending the new text node

If you want to have a CDATA section, use this:

<?php
$doc
= DOMDocument::loadXML('<node>old content</node>');
$node = $doc->getElementsByTagName('node')->item(0);
$node->removeChild($node->firstChild);
$newText = $doc->createCDATASection('new cdata content');
$node->appendChild($newText);
echo
"Content withCDATA: ".$doc->saveXML($node)."\n";
?>
up
19
R. Studer
14 years ago
For clarification:
The assumingly 'discoverd' by previous posters and seemingly undocumented methods (.getElementsByTagName and .getAttribute) on this class (DOMNode) are in fact methods of the class DOMElement, which inherits from DOMNode.

See: http://www.php.net/manual/en/class.domelement.php
up
6
Steve K
14 years ago
This class apparently also has a getElementsByTagName method.

I was able to confirm this by evaluating the output from DOMNodeList->item() against various tests with the is_a() function.
up
9
brian wildwoodassociates.info
15 years ago
This class has a getAttribute method.

Assume that a DOMNode object $ref contained an anchor taken out of a DOMNode List. Then

$url = $ref->getAttribute('href');

would isolate the url associated with the href part of the anchor.
up
5
alastair dot dallas at gmail dot com
12 years ago
The issues around mixed content took me some experimentation to remember, so I thought I'd add this note to save others time.

When your markup is something like: <div><p>First text.</p><ul><li><p>First bullet</p></li></ul></div>, you'll get XML_ELEMENT_NODEs that are quite regular. The <div> has children <p> and <ul> and the nodeValue for both <p>s yields the text you expect.

But when your markup is more like <p>This is <b>bold</b> and this is <i>italic</i>.</p>, you realize that the nodeValue for XML_ELEMENT_NODEs is not reliable. In this case, you need to look at the <p>'s child nodes. For this example, the <p> has children: #text, <b>, #text, <i>, #text.

In this example, the nodeValue of <b> and <i> is the same as their #text children. But you could have markup like: <p>This <b>is bold and <i>bold italic</i></b>, you see?</p>. In this case, you need to look at the children of <b>, which will be #text, <i>, because the nodeValue of <b> will not be sufficient.

XML_TEXT_NODEs have no children and are always named '#text'. Depending on how whitespace is handled, your tree may have "empty" #text nodes as children of <body> and elsewhere.

Attributes are nodes, but I had forgotten that they are not in the tree expressed by childNodes. Walking the full tree using childNodes will not visit any attribute nodes.
up
7
imranomar at gmail dot com
13 years ago
Just discovered that node->nodeValue strips out all the tags
up
2
metanull
9 years ago
Yet another DOMNode to php array conversion function.
Other ones on this page are generating too "complex" arrays; this one should keep the array as tidy as possible.
Note: make sure to set LIBXML_NOBLANKS when calling DOMDocument::load, loadXML or loadHTML
See: http://be2.php.net/manual/en/libxml.constants.php
See: http://be2.php.net/manual/en/domdocument.loadxml.php

<?php
/**
* Returns an array representation of a DOMNode
* Note, make sure to use the LIBXML_NOBLANKS flag when loading XML into the DOMDocument
* @param DOMDocument $dom
* @param DOMNode $node
* @return array
*/
function nodeToArray( $dom, $node) {
if(!
is_a( $dom, 'DOMDocument' ) || !is_a( $node, 'DOMNode' )) {
return
false;
}
$array = false;
if( empty(
trim( $node->localName ))) {// Discard empty nodes
return false;
}
if(
XML_TEXT_NODE == $node->nodeType ) {
return
$node->nodeValue;
}
foreach (
$node->attributes as $attr) {
$array['@'.$attr->localName] = $attr->nodeValue;
}
foreach (
$node->childNodes as $childNode) {
if (
1 == $childNode->childNodes->length && XML_TEXT_NODE == $childNode->firstChild->nodeType ) {
$array[$childNode->localName] = $childNode->nodeValue;
} else {
if(
false !== ($a = self::nodeToArray( $dom, $childNode))) {
$array[$childNode->localName] = $a;
}
}
}
return
$array;
}
?>
up
2
pizarropablo at gmail dot com
10 years ago
In response to: alastair dot dallas at gmail dot com about "#text" nodes.
"#text" nodes appear when there are spaces or new lines between end tag and next initial tag.

Eg "<data><age>10</age>[SPACES]<other>20</other>[SPACES]</data>"

"data" childNodes has 4 childs:
- age = 10
- #text = spaces
- other = 20
- #text = spaces
up
4
matt at lamplightdb dot co dot uk
15 years ago
And apparently also a setAttribute method too:

$node->setAttribute( 'attrName' , 'value' );
up
1
matej dot golian at gmail dot com
10 years ago
Here is a little function that truncates a DomNode to a specified number of text characters. I use it to generate HTML excerpts for my blog entries.

<?php

function makehtmlexcerpt(DomNode $html, $excerptlength)
{
$remove = 0;
$htmllength = strlen(html_entity_decode($html->textContent, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'));
$truncate = $htmllength - $excerptlength;
if(
$htmllength > $excerptlength)
{
if(
$html->hasChildNodes())
{
$children = $html->childNodes;
for(
$counter = 0; $counter < $children->length; $counter ++)
{
$child = $children->item($children->length - ($counter + 1));
$childlength = strlen(html_entity_decode($child->textContent, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'));
if(
$childlength <= $truncate)
{
$remove ++;
$truncate = $truncate - $childlength;
}
else
{
$child = makehtmlexcerpt($child, $childlength - $truncate);
break;
}
}
if(
$remove != 0)
{
for(
$counter = 0; $counter < $remove; $counter ++)
{
$html->removeChild($html->lastChild);
}
}
}
else
{
if(
$html->nodeName == '#text')
{
$html->nodeValue = substr(html_entity_decode($html->nodeValue, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), 0, $htmllength - $truncate);
}
}
}
return
$html;
}

?>
up
-1
Anonymous
6 years ago
It would be helpful if docs for concrete properties mentioned readonly status of some properties:
"
ownerDocument

The DOMDocument object associated with this node.

"
up
-1
zlk1214 at gmail dot com
8 years ago
A function that can set the inner HTML without encoding error. $html can be broken content such as "<a ID=id20>ssss"
function setInnerHTML($node, $html) {
removeChildren($node);
if (empty($html)) {
return;
}

$doc = $node->ownerDocument;
$htmlclip = new DOMDocument();
$htmlclip->loadHTML('<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8"><div>' . $html . '</div>');
$clipNode = $doc->importNode($htmlclip->documentElement->lastChild->firstChild, true);
while ($item = $clipNode->firstChild) {
$node->appendChild($item);
}
}
up
-9
I. Cook
14 years ago
For a reference with more information about the XML DOM node types, see http://www.w3schools.com/dom/dom_nodetype.asp

(When using PHP DOMNode, these constants need to be prefaced with "XML_")
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