Retrieve value of a textarea with PHP
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22-09-2019 - |
Question
Would anyone perhaps know how to get the value of a specific element in an HTML document with PHP? What I'm doing right now is using file_get_contents
to pull up the HTML code from another website, and on that website there is a textarea:
<textarea id="body" name="body" rows="12" cols="75" tabindex="1">Hello World!</textarea>
What I want to do is have my script do the file_get_contents
and just pull out the "Hello World!" from the textarea. Is that possible? Sorry for bugging you guys, again, you give such helpful advice :].
Solution
Don't be sorry for bugging us, this is a good question I'm happy to answer. You can use PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser to get what you need:
$html = file_get_html('http://www.domain.com/');
$textarea = $html->find('textarea[id=body]');
$contents = $textarea->innertext;
echo $contents; // Outputs 'Hello World!'
If you want to use file_get_contents()
, you can do it like this:
$raw_html = file_get_contents('http://www.domain.com/');
$html = str_get_html($raw_html);
...
Although I don't see any need for the file_get_contents()
as you can use the outertext
method to get the original, full HTML out if you need it somewhere:
$html = file_get_html('http://www.domain.com/');
$raw_html = $html->outertext;
Just for the kicks, you can do this also with an one-liner regular expression:
preg_match('~<textarea id="body".*?>(.*?)</textarea>~', file_get_contents('http://www.domain.com/'), $matches);
echo $matches[1][0]; // Outputs 'Hello World!'
I'd strongly advise against this though as you are a lot more vulnerable to code changes which might break this regular expression.
OTHER TIPS
I'd suggest using PHPs DOM & DOMXPath classes.
$dom = DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile( $url );
$xpath = new DOMXPath( $dom );
$nodes = $xpath->query('//textarea[id=body]' )
$result = array();
for( $nodes as $node ) {
$result[] = $node->textContent;
}
There $result
would contain the value of every textarea with id body.