When using PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser, is it normal that line breaks
tags are stripped out?
Another option should one wish to preserve other formatting such as paragraphs & headings is to use innertext
rather than plaintext
then perform your own string cleaning with the result.
I realise there is a performance hit but it does allow for more granular control.
Was struggling with this as well, since I needed the HTML to be easily editable after processing.
Apparently there's a boolean in the SimpleHTMLDOM
script $stripRN
, that's set to true
on default. It strips the \r
, \n
or \r\n
tags in the HTML.
Set the var to false
(several occurences in the script..) and your problem is solved.
If you were passing by here wondering if you can do the same thing in DomDocument then I'm please to say you can! - but it's a bit dirty :(
I had a snippet of code I wanted to tidy but retain the exact line breaks it contained (\n). This is what I did....
// NOTE: If you're HTML isn't a full HTML document then expect DomDocument to
// start creating its own DOCTYPE, head and body tags.
// Convert \n into a pretend tag
$myContent = preg_replace("/[\n]/","<img src=\"slashN\" />",$myContent);
// Do your DOM stuff...
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($myContent);
$dom->formatOutput = true;
$myContent = $dom->saveHTML();
// Remove the \n's that DOMDocument put in itself
$myContent = preg_replace("/[\n]/","",$myContent);
// Put my own \n's back
$myContent = preg_replace("/<img src=\"slashN\" \/>/i","\n",$myContent);
It's important to note that I know, without a shadow of a doubt that my input contained only \n. You may want your own variations if \r\n or \t needs to be accounted for. eg slash.T or slash.RN etc
You don't have to change all $stripRN
to false, the only one that affects this behavior is at line 816 ``:
// load html from string
function load($str, $lowercase=true, $stripRN=false, $defaultBRText=DEFAULT_BR_TEXT) {
Also consider to change line 988, because multibyte functions often are not installed on machines that do not deal with non-wester-european languages. Original line in v1.5 breaks the script immediately:
if (function_exists('mb_detect_encoding')) { $charset = mb_detect_encoding($this->root->plaintext . "ascii", $encoding_list = array( "UTF-8", "CP1252" ) ); } else $charset === false;
I know this is old, but I was looking for this as well, and realized there was actually a built in option to turn off the removal of line breaks. No need to go editing the source.
The PHP Simple HTML Dom Parser's load
function supports multiple useful parameters:
load($str, $lowercase=true, $stripRN=false, $defaultBRText=DEFAULT_BR_TEXT)
When calling the load
function, simply pass false
as the third parameter.
$html = new simple_html_dom();
$html->load("<html><head></head><body>stuff</body></html>", true, false);
If using file_get_html
, it's the ninth parameter.
file_get_html($url, $use_include_path = false, $context=null, $offset = -1, $maxLen=-1, $lowercase = true, $forceTagsClosed=true, $target_charset = DEFAULT_TARGET_CHARSET, $stripRN=true, $defaultBRText=DEFAULT_BR_TEXT)
Edit: For str_get_html
, it's the fifth parameter (Thanks yitwail)
str_get_html($str, $lowercase=true, $forceTagsClosed=true, $target_charset = DEFAULT_TARGET_CHARSET, $stripRN=true, $defaultBRText=DEFAULT_BR_TEXT, $defaultSpanText=DEFAULT_SPAN_TEXT)