How Can I Efficiently Parse and Process HTML/XML in PHP?

How do you parse and process HTML/XML in PHP?

PHP offers a wide range of approaches for parsing and processing HTML or XML:

Native XML Extensions

• DOM (Document Object Model): Provides an object-oriented interface for manipulating XML documents, including parsing, modifying, and querying.
• XMLReader: An XML pull parser that operates as a cursor, traversing the document and stopping at each node.
• XML Parser: A SAX (Simple API for XML) style push parser that creates XML parsers and defines event handlers.
• SimpleXML: Converts XML to objects, enabling easy processing with property selectors and iterators.

3rd Party Libraries (libxml based)

• FluentDOM: A jQuery-like interface for the DOM, using XPath or CSS selectors.
• HtmlPageDom: Manipulate HTML documents using DOM, extending DomCrawler with methods for manipulating the DOM tree.
• phpQuery: A CSS3 selector-driven DOM API based on jQuery.
• laminas-dom: Provides tools for working with DOM documents and structures, including CSS selectors.
• fDOMDocument: Extends the standard DOM with exception handling and convenience methods.
• sabre/xml: A library for mapping XML to objects/arrays, providing fast and low-memory processing.
• FluidXML: A concise and fluent API for manipulating XML using XPath.

3rd-Party (not libxml-based)

• PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser: A fast and easy-to-use HTML parser, not recommended for performance reasons.
• PHP Html Parser: A CSS selector-based parser, not recommended due to slow performance.

HTML 5

• HTML5DomDocument: Extends the native DOMDocument library, fixing bugs and adding new features for HTML5.
• HTML5: A standards-compliant HTML5 parser and writer written entirely in PHP.

Regular Expressions

Regular expressions are not recommended for parsing HTML due to their brittleness. Custom parsers using regular expressions are time-consuming to write, and less reliable than existing libraries.

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