How to Efficiently Parse and Process HTML/XML in PHP: Which Method Should You Choose?

How to Parse and Process HTML/XML in PHP

Native XML Extensions

• DOM: Powerful DOM API that allows for manipulation and querying of XML documents.
• XMLReader: XML pull parser that provides access to individual nodes in the document.
• XML Parser: SAX-style XML push parser that allows for event-driven handling of XML elements.
• SimpleXML: Simplifies XML parsing by converting XML to objects with property selectors and array iterators.

3rd Party Libraries (LibXML Based)

• FluentDom: jQuery-like fluent interface for DOM manipulation.
• HtmlPageDom: Extends DOMCrawler with methods for manipulating HTML documents.
• phpQuery: jQuery-style CSS selector-based DOM API.
• Laminas-Dom: Provides a unified interface for querying DOM documents using XPath and CSS selectors.
• fDOMDocument: Extends standard DOM with exceptions and custom methods for convenience.
• Sabre/XML: Wraps and extends XMLReader and XMLWriter classes for object mapping.
• FluidXML: Fluent API for manipulating XML with XPath and fluent programming patterns.

3rd Party (Non-LibXML-Based)

• PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser: Supports invalid HTML, but has low performance.
• PHP Html Parser: Simple HTML parser with CSS selector support, but is also slow.

HTML 5

• HTML5DOMDocument: Fixes bugs and adds functionality to the DOMDocument library for HTML5.
• HTML5: Standards-compliant HTML5 parser and writer entirely written in PHP.

Regular Expressions (Least Recommended)

• Brittle and discouraged for HTML parsing due to syntactic complexities.

Books

• PHP Architect's Guide to Webscraping with PHP

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