DiDOM is a PHP library designed for parsing HTML and XML documents. It provides a simple and efficient way to navigate and manipulate the DOM (Document Object Model) of a webpage. DiDOM is not as widely known as other PHP DOM manipulation libraries like PHP's built-in DOMDocument or simplexml, or third-party libraries like phpQuery or Simple HTML DOM Parser, but it offers a range of features that make it a compelling choice for many web scraping tasks.
Here are some of the main features of DiDOM:
Easy to Use: DiDOM provides an intuitive and straightforward API for selecting and manipulating HTML elements. It supports CSS selectors for easy element selection.
CSS Selector Support: DiDOM allows you to select elements using CSS selectors, which are more familiar to many developers than XPath queries. This makes it easier to transition from front-end development to server-side parsing.
Performance: DiDOM is designed to be fast and lightweight. It can handle large documents quickly, making it suitable for web scraping tasks that require processing a lot of data.
Chaining Methods: The library supports method chaining, which allows you to apply multiple methods to an element or a set of elements in a single, readable line of code.
Manipulation Capabilities: DiDOM enables you to easily manipulate the DOM, such as adding, removing, or changing elements and their attributes.
UTF-8 Support: The library handles UTF-8 encoded documents correctly, ensuring that you can work with web pages in various languages without encountering encoding issues.
Error Handling: It provides error handling capabilities, allowing you to catch and manage parsing errors in a controlled manner.
Find Elements by Attributes: You can select elements by their attributes, which is useful when you need to scrape data based on specific criteria.
Here is a basic example of using DiDOM to parse an HTML string and select elements with a specific class:
require 'vendor/autoload.php'; // Make sure to include the Composer autoload file
use DiDom\Document;
$html = <<<HTML
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Example Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<div class="content">
<p>Some example text.</p>
</div>
<div class="content">
<p>Another paragraph of text.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
HTML;
$document = new Document($html);
// Select elements with the class 'content'
$elements = $document->find('.content');
foreach ($elements as $element) {
echo $element->text(); // Outputs the text content of each '.content' element
}
To install DiDOM, you would typically use Composer, the dependency manager for PHP. Here's the command to include DiDOM in your PHP project:
composer require imangazaliev/didom
It's important to note that DiDOM, like any web scraping tool, should be used responsibly and in compliance with the terms of service of the websites you're scraping. Always check a website's robots.txt file and terms of service to ensure you're allowed to scrape their data.
