PHP 8.3.4 Released!

DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile

(PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile Load HTML from a file

Description

public DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile(string $filename, int $options = 0): bool

The function parses the HTML document in the file named filename. Unlike loading XML, HTML does not have to be well-formed to load.

Warning

This function parses the input using an HTML 4 parser. The parsing rules of HTML 5, which is what modern web browsers use, are different. Depending on the input this might result in a different DOM structure. Therefore this function cannot be safely used for sanitizing HTML.

As an example, some HTML elements will implicitly close a parent element when encountered. The rules for automatically closing parent elements differ between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and thus the resulting DOM structure that DOMDocument sees might be different from the DOM structure a web browser sees, possibly allowing an attacker to break the resulting HTML.

Parameters

filename

The path to the HTML file.

options

Bitwise OR of the libxml option constants.

Return Values

Returns true on success or false on failure.

Errors/Exceptions

If an empty string is passed as the filename or an empty file is named, a warning will be generated. This warning is not generated by libxml and cannot be handled using libxml's error handling functions.

While malformed HTML should load successfully, this function may generate E_WARNING errors when it encounters bad markup. libxml's error handling functions may be used to handle these errors.

Changelog

Version Description
8.3.0 This function now has a tentative bool return type.
8.0.0 Calling this function statically will now throw an Error. Previously, an E_DEPRECATED was raised.

Examples

Example #1 Creating a Document

<?php
$doc
= new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTMLFile("filename.html");
echo
$doc->saveHTML();
?>

See Also

add a note

User Contributed Notes 6 notes

up
13
onemanbanddan at gmail dot com
10 years ago
The options for surpressing errors and warnings will not work with this as they do for loadXML()
e.g.
<?php
$doc
->loadHTMLFile($file, LIBXML_NOWARNING | LIBXML_NOERROR);
?>
will not work.
you must use:
<?php
libxml_use_internal_errors
(true);
$doc->loadHTMLFile($file);
?>
and handle the exceptions as neccesarry.
up
3
Mark Omohundro, ajamyajax dot com
15 years ago
<?php
// try this html listing example for all nodes / includes a few getElementsByTagName options:

$file = $DOCUMENT_ROOT. "test.html";
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTMLFile($file);

// example 1:
$elements = $doc->getElementsByTagName('*');
// example 2:
$elements = $doc->getElementsByTagName('html');
// example 3:
//$elements = $doc->getElementsByTagName('body');
// example 4:
//$elements = $doc->getElementsByTagName('table');
// example 5:
//$elements = $doc->getElementsByTagName('div');

if (!is_null($elements)) {
foreach (
$elements as $element) {
echo
"<br/>". $element->nodeName. ": ";

$nodes = $element->childNodes;
foreach (
$nodes as $node) {
echo
$node->nodeValue. "\n";
}
}
}
?>
up
-2
qrworld.net
9 years ago
In this post http://softontherocks.blogspot.com/2014/11/descargar-el-contenido-de-una-url_11.html I found a simple way to get the content of a URL with DOMDocument, loadHTMLFile and saveHTML().

function getURLContent($url){
$doc = new DOMDocument;
$doc->preserveWhiteSpace = FALSE;
@$doc->loadHTMLFile($url);
return $doc->saveHTML();
}
up
-4
andy at carobert dot com
18 years ago
This puts the HTML into a DOM object which can be parsed by individual tags, attributes, etc.. Here is an example of getting all the 'href' attributes and corresponding node values out of the 'a' tag. Very cool....

<?php
$myhtml
= <<<EOF
<html>
<head>
<title>My Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p><a href="/mypage1">Hello World!</a></p>
<p><a href="/mypage2">Another Hello World!</a></p>
</body>
</html>
EOF;

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($myhtml);

$tags = $doc->getElementsByTagName('a');

foreach (
$tags as $tag) {
echo
$tag->getAttribute('href').' | '.$tag->nodeValue."\n";
}
?>

This should output:

/mypage1 | Hello World!
/mypage2 | Another Hello World!
up
-17
gzech at SPAMFILTER dot eso dot org
17 years ago
If you want to suppress output warnings from loadHTMLFile($url), put an @ sign in front. This even works in:
<?php
$load
= @$dom->loadHTMLFile($url);
?>
up
-19
bens at effortlessis dot com
18 years ago
Note that this function doesn't parse the individual tags WITHIN the html file - it's all loaded as a "black box", and you end up with an XML widget that comprises nothing but the complete chunk of HTML.

I was hoping it would function as a sort of HTML-validator/parser, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
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