Simple HTML DOM is a PHP library that allows you to easily manipulate HTML documents. It provides an API to traverse and manipulate HTML elements in a DOM-like fashion. However, Simple HTML DOM does not natively support XPath queries out of the box. It has its own set of methods and selectors for finding and manipulating elements.
Simple HTML DOM selectors are more akin to CSS selectors, and while they are quite powerful, they do not offer the full flexibility or complexity of XPath. If you need to perform XPath queries in PHP, you might consider using the DOMDocument and DOMXPath classes that are built into PHP and provide native XPath support.
Here's a basic example of how to use DOMDocument and DOMXPath in PHP to perform an XPath query:
<?php
$htmlString = <<<HTML
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Sample Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">
<p class="paragraph">First paragraph</p>
<p class="paragraph">Second paragraph</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
HTML;
// Load the HTML into a DOMDocument
$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($htmlString);
// Create a DOMXPath instance
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
// Perform an XPath query
$paragraphs = $xpath->query("//div[@id='content']/p");
// Iterate over the results
foreach ($paragraphs as $paragraph) {
echo $paragraph->nodeValue . "\n";
}
?>
In this example, we use DOMDocument to load the HTML content, and then we create a DOMXPath object to perform an XPath query that selects all <p> elements that are children of the <div> element with an id of "content".
If you are specifically looking for a library that supports both CSS-like selectors and XPath, you might want to consider using libraries like phpQuery or QueryPath in PHP. These libraries offer a more extensive range of features for HTML manipulation and can handle XPath queries as well.
