Parsing HTML with PHP's DOMDocument and XPath

When attempting to parse HTML using PHP's DOMDocument, a common issue is finding specific text within tags of particular classes. Using DOMDocument::getElementsByTagName alone may not suffice in such cases.

To capture specific text within tags of a target class, an alternative approach utilizing DOMDocument and DOMXPath is recommended. DOMXPath allows for powerful XPath queries to locate elements based on their attributes and structure.

Consider the following HTML:

    

    Capture this text 1
    



    

    Capture this text 2
    

To retrieve the text within the

php
$html = 
    

    Capture this text 1
    

string 'Capture this text 1' (length=19)
string 'Capture this text 2' (length=19)