Convert A (nested)html Unordered List Of Links To Php Array Of Links

I have a regular, nested HTML unordered list of links, and I'd like to scrape it with PHP and convert it to an array. The original list looks something like this:

Solution 1:

Use DOMDocument and SimpleXMLElement along the lines of:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($html);
$xmlStr = $doc->saveXml($doc->documentElement);

$xml = new SimpleXmlElement($xmlStr);

$links = array();

foreach ($xml->xpath('//a') as$li) {
    $links[] = $li->attributes()->href;
}

If href is being added to $links as a SimpleXMLElement, use ob_start and ob_clean to capture the string.

Cheat sheet for xpath queries (pdf)

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