PHP Getting Text and Href from HTML page using XPATH

Question

This is my first question on Stack ever, so forgive me if something is improper.

I got a webpage where there is a list of information i like to extract, there is also a in one of the td's but i can't wrap my head around how to get access to it.

Example HTML:

<tbody>
  <tr>
   <td>
     19-10-2020 @ 17:33
   </td>
   <td class="hidden-xs hidden-sm">
    <a href="#" data-identifier="5f8db1c332ea9b22d375b7c0"></a>                                       
   </td>

Here is the example PHP i used to extract the other TD's

$xpath = new DOMXpath($document);
        
        foreach($xpath->evaluate('//table/tbody/tr') as $tr) {
    

enter code here

        
            $i = 0;
            $row = [];
            foreach ($xpath->evaluate('td', $tr) as $td) {
                if ($i == 0){
                    $row['datumtijd'] = date_format(date_create(str_replace(" @", "",trim($td->nodeValue))),"Y-m-d H:i:s");
                }
                if ($i == 1){
                  print_r($td->nodeValue); //Completely empty
                }

Any help is really appreciated.

Answer 1

Focusing only on extracting the data (and not on formatting, etc.) and assuming your html is fixed like below, try something along the lines of:

 $str = '
<tbody>
  <tr>
   <td>
     19-10-2020 @ 17:33
   </td>
   <td class="hidden-xs hidden-sm">
    <a href="#" data-identifier="5f8db1c332ea9b22d375b7c0"></a>                                       
   </td>
  </tr>
</tbody>
';
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($str);
$doc = simplexml_import_dom($doc);
$dates = $doc->xpath('//td[1]');
$identifiers = $doc->xpath('//td/a[@href]/@data-identifier');

foreach(array_combine($dates, $identifiers) as $date => $identifier) {
    echo trim($date) . "\n";
    echo trim($identifier) . "\n";
}

Output:

19-10-2020 @ 17:33
5f8db1c332ea9b22d375b7c0

Answer 2

There's an easy way to get the nth element using php without xpath:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($HTML);
foreach($dom->getElementsByTagName('table') as $table) {
  echo innerHTML($table->getElementsByTagName('td')->item(ITEM_NUMBER))
}