What best practices should be followed when using DOM and XPath in PHP to process table content?

When using DOM and XPath in PHP to process table content, it is best practice to first load the HTML content into a DOMDocument object, then use XPath queries to navigate and extract the desired table data. By using XPath, you can target specific elements within the table structure more efficiently than using DOM traversal methods. 

<?php
$html = '<table>
            <tr>
                <td>Row 1, Column 1</td>
                <td>Row 1, Column 2</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td>Row 2, Column 1</td>
                <td>Row 2, Column 2</td>
            </tr>
        </table>';

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$rows = $xpath->query('//table/tr');

foreach ($rows as $row) {
    $columns = $xpath->query('td', $row);
    foreach ($columns as $column) {
        echo $column->nodeValue . ' ';
    }
    echo '<br>';
}
?>

Keywords

DOM XPath PHP table content processing

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