$content = '<div class="test"><a href="test.se">Link</a></div>';
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($content);
$xpath = new DomXPath($dom);
$tag = $dom->getElementsByTagName("a");
$counter = $tag->length;
for ($i = 0; $i < $counter; $i++) {
	$result = $tag->item($i)->nodeValue;
	$content = str_replace($result, '<img src="http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=seo.getupdated.se&alt=feed" />'.$result, $content);
	echo $tag->item($i)-> getAttribute('href').'<br>';
}

Helpful PHP functions

• Cats who code – PHP snippets
• Cats who code – PHP string functions
• Edrackham – Get days between two dates
• 24 hour apps – Dates between two dates

Misc

• Kavoir – Make PHP5 classes work with PHP4
• CSS tricks – CSS with PHP
• Electric tool box – Associative array with str_replace
• My little scripts – PHP calendar

Leave a comment if you know a great resource to PHP functions.

Don’t use urlencode

In PHP there is a function to convert strings to be URL friendly. The function is called urlencode.

Function call – urlencode

$string = 'Det här är ett "citat" i en url';
echo urlencode($string);

Printed out on the screen

Det+h%E4r+%E4r+ett+%22citat%22+i+en+url

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look very good.

Use super_urlencode instead

The advantage of super_urlencode is that the string looks much better for humans. This version of super_urlencode is made for swedish characters but works fine with english URLs as well.

Function – super_urlencode

<?php
$string = 'Det här är ett "citat" i en url';

function super_urlencode($string)
{
     $string = trim($string);
     $string = strtolower($string);
     $string = str_replace(array('å', 'ä', 'ö', ' '), array('a', 'a', 'o', '-'), $string);
     $string = preg_replace("/[^a-z0-9-]/", "", $string);
     $string = preg_replace("/[-]+/", "-", $string);

     return $string;
}
echo super_urlencode($string);
?>

Function call – super_urlencode

$string= 'Det här är ett "citat" i en url';
echo super_urlencode($string);

Printed out on the screen

det-har-ar-ett-citat-i-en-url

Example

This example is downloading data from an XML file from an RSS feed by using XPath. The XML file is downloaded with Curl, so make sure it is enabled on the server that runs the script. The titles are printed out, just to show that it works. Copy, paste and run the code on a server and it should work instantly. The RSS feed I choose for this example is WordPress development blog.

<?php
function get_url($url)
{
     $curl = curl_init();
     curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
     curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
     curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
     $data = curl_exec($curl);
     curl_close($curl);
     return $data;
}

function get_url_data()
{
     $xml_content = get_url("http://wordpress.org/development/feed/");
     $dom = new DOMDocument();
     @$dom->loadXML($xml_content);
     $xpath = new DomXPath($dom);
     $content_title = $xpath->query('//channel//title/text()');
     return $content_title;
}

function print_url_data()
{
     $content = get_url_data();
     foreach ($content as $value)
     {
          $output .= $value->nodeValue . "<br />";
     }
     return $output;
}

echo print_url_data();
?>

Change Xpath to get the title, description and link

The example above prints out the titles. You might need to print out URL or descriptions as well. Change the bold part with the Xpath query of your choice:

//channel//title/text()
//channel//description/text()
//channel//link/text()