What are the best practices for handling and manipulating HTML elements in PHP to avoid unnecessary iterations and improve performance?

When handling and manipulating HTML elements in PHP, it is important to minimize unnecessary iterations to improve performance. One way to achieve this is by using the DOMDocument class to parse and manipulate HTML elements efficiently. By directly accessing and modifying specific elements using methods like getElementById() or querySelector(), you can avoid looping through the entire DOM tree.

// Create a new DOMDocument object
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($html);

// Get the element with id 'example'
$element = $doc->getElementById('example');

// Manipulate the element
$element->setAttribute('class', 'new-class');

// Output the modified HTML
echo $doc->saveHTML();