Is it possible to use XPath to extract content from XML or HTML formats that are not native to it?

XPath is designed to work with XML and HTML documents that adhere to their respective standards. If you need to extract content from XML or HTML formats that are not native to XPath, you can preprocess the document to convert it into a format that XPath can work with. This can involve cleaning up the document, restructuring it, or converting it into valid XML or HTML. 

// Example code to preprocess a non-native XML document into a format that XPath can work with
$nonNativeXml = '<data><item>Item 1</item><item>Item 2</item></data>';

// Preprocess the non-native XML document to make it XPath-compatible
$cleanedXml = '<root>' . $nonNativeXml . '</root>';

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML($cleanedXml);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);

// Use XPath to extract content from the preprocessed document
$items = $xpath->query('//item');

foreach ($items as $item) {
    echo $item->nodeValue . PHP_EOL;
}

Keywords

XPath XML HTML extraction PHP

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